Night of the Dead Living

Femke Hiemstra Preview

via hiemstraroq09.blogspot.com

By the time you can study it, I assure you it's fucking dead.

Creature Features Intro '71

TAVEL/WARHOL RETROSPECTIVE AT ANTHOLOGY!!!

Vinyl (c)2009 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie
Institute. All rights reserved.

Look, you will never get to see most of these movies unless you somehow have keys to the vault at the MoMA (which you don't, I know all of you and I know that you do not).
So this means you need to see this. You can either watch a bootleg version of Factory Girl on Youtube again, which the only parts of that movie that are any good are the reenactments of the films they make, or you can go see the films themselves which are about as cool as anything can get. They are basically the precursors to all of your favorite John Waters' movies. They are rad and you need them in your life. If you are not lucky enough to see these at Anthology (first and foremost this means you are UNLUCKY) you should try to get these anyway you can.

Here is the actual press list with descriptions of the movies because I don't feel like finding clever ways to rewrite these already professional descriptions. 

THURSDAY’S SCREENING INTRODUCED BY ANDY WARHOL SCHOLAR CALLIE ANGELL!
Andy Warhol
SCREEN TEST #1
1965, 66 minutes, 16mm.
The first Warhol film Tavel scripted, SCREEN TEST #1 stars Philip Fagan as the subject of Tavel’s off-screen examination. In the face of his tester’s increasingly suggestive and campy instructions, Fagan becomes stubbornly unresponsive, refusing to follow Tavel’s lead and falling back instead on the appeal of his own silent good looks. Although Fagan’s wooden performance prompted Warhol and Tavel to remake the film with Mario Montez (SCREEN TEST #2), this first version is a fascinating look into the complexities of queer identity in the 1960s.
–Thursday, December 10 at 7:00 and Sunday, December 13 at 5:30.
 

Screen Test #2 (c)2009 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie
Institute. All rights reserved. 
 
Andy Warhol
SCREEN TEST #2
1965, 67 minutes, 16mm.
As Mario Montez auditions for the role of Esmerelda in THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME, Tavel, again off-screen, subjects the actor to a series of increasingly humiliating improvisations. But Mario’s faith in his self-created persona sustains the illusion of his character and becomes, in the end, a triumph of performance art.
–Thursday, December 10 at 9:00 and Sunday, December 13 at 7:00.

Andy Warhol
HEDY
1966, 67 minutes, 16mm.
HEDY presents the adventures of Hedy Lamarr, as she receives a face-lift, is arrested for shoplifting, and goes on trial to face the accusations of her five former husbands. Mario Montez gives one of his most outstanding performances in the title role, and the film features appearances by Mary Woronov, Ingrid Superstar, Gerard Malanga, and Jack Smith. Filmed with the usual amount of Warholian chaos in a loft full of used furniture, HEDY also includes live music by the Velvet Underground.
–Friday, December 11 at 7:00 and Sunday, December 13 at 4:00.

Andy Warhol
VINYL
1965, 66 minutes, 16mm.
An adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s novel, A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, which is about as far from Kubrick’s version as possible. The misbehavior and reconditioning of the young hoodlum Victor (Gerard Malanga) takes place in a claustrophobic setting crammed with cast members and S&M practitioners. Though she had a walk-on part in HORSE, VINYL marks the first significant appearance in a Warhol film of Superstar Edie Sedgwick, who, though sitting silently in the foreground throughout, somehow manages to steal the movie from its ostensible stars.
–Friday, December 11 at 9:00 and Monday, December 14 at 7:00.

Andy Warhol
KITCHEN
1965, 66 minutes, 16mm.
Tavel’s heterosexual satire was filmed in a real kitchen, with Edie Sedgwick and Roger Trudeau playing an unhappy couple, Jo and Mikie. The action is interrupted by various chaotic activities: the running of a blender which drowns out the dialogue, the continual sneezing of Sedgwick and her co-stars, a bustling houseboy played by Rene Ricard, and photographer David McCabe, who repeatedly strides onto the set to take photos of the actors. Note: The hair which appears in the frame is part of the film.
–Saturday, December 12 at 4:00 and Monday, December 14 at 8:45.

Andy Warhol
THE LIFE OF JUANITA CASTRO
1965, 66 minutes, 16mm.
An article written by Castro’s sister in 1964 inspired Tavel’s script for this film, a subversive avant-garde satire on Latin American politics in which Fidel Castro is played by a woman, while Marie Menken stars as Juanita. The entire cast, representing Castro’s family, sits in rows of chairs grouped for a family portrait. They all follow directions from Tavel, who sits in the last row feeding the actors their lines, which they repeat in a mixture of Spanish and English.
–Saturday, December 12 at 5:30 and Wednesday, December 16 at 8:45.

Andy Warhol
HORSE
1965, 105 minutes, 16mm.
Staged at the Factory with a rented horse, this is a homoerotic parody of the Western genre. The enacting of Tavel’s script (followed with difficulty from cue cards held up off-screen) takes place on a set crowded with evidence of the film’s production: mounted lights, a boom mic, assorted onlookers, and the Factory doors and telephone all visible in the frame. The film may be shown with either two or three reels. The ‘action’ occurs in Reels 1 & 3; Reel 2, a 33-minute ‘documentary’ shot of the horse standing in front of the Factory doors, may be shown either in the middle or at the end of the film. Any votes?
–Saturday, December 12 at 7:00 and Tuesday, December 15 at 8:45.

Andy Warhol
HARLOT
1964, 67 minutes, 16mm.
Warhol’s first synch-sound feature is an underground version of the Jean Harlow story with Mario Montez in drag as the platinum-haired Hollywood sex symbol of the 1930s. Staged as a kind of tableau vivant on a couch at the Factory, with Montez occupying the center of a carefully composed group of Superstars, along with a large white cat, HARLOT was the first film Tavel worked on with Warhol, though it was not based on one of his scripts. Instead he, Billy Name, and Harry Fainlight improvised the off-screen conversation that dominates the soundtrack, while on-screen the film culminates with Montez consuming copious quantities of bananas in highly suggestive ways.
–Saturday, December 12 at 9:15 and Wednesday, December 16 at 7:00.

Andy Warhol
SPACE
1965, 66 minutes, 16mm.
SPACE is based on a Tavel scenario, in which various characters are supposed to recite lines from eight unconnected scripts while Warhol’s roving camera moves among them. However, the large assembled cast – which includes Edie Sedgwick, as well as folk singer Eric Andersen and Dorothy Dean – seems completely uninterested in following the script, and SPACE transforms itself from a Tavel film into an Edie Sedgwick film before our eyes.
–Sunday, December 13 at 8:30 and Tuesday, December 15 at 7:00.

BACK BY (EVEN MORE) POPULAR DEMAND!
Andy Warhol
THE CHELSEA GIRLS
1966, ca. 210 minutes, 16mm double-projection. With Nico, Ondine, Marie Menken, Mary Woronov, Gerard Malanga, International Velvet, Ingrid Superstar, Mario Montez, Eric Emerson, and Brigid Berlin.
Warhol’s double-screen masterpiece – consisting of 12 unedited reels, shown side-by-side, with only one soundtrack audible at a time – depicts the Chelsea Hotel as a teeming hive of Superstars, junkies, prostitutes, and generally out-sized personalities. Though most of THE CHELSEA GIRLS was unscripted, two of the 12 reels – the sections entitled “Hannoi Hanna” and “Their Town”, and both featuring Mary Woronov among others – were based on scripts by Tavel.
–Thursday, December 17 at 7:00.

Arthur Lubin
WHITE SAVAGE
1943, 76 minutes, 35mm. With Maria Montez, Jon Hall, and Sabu.
In addition to collaborating with Warhol, Tavel was closely associated with Jack Smith, though their work together primarily took the form of theatrical events which, sadly, went mostly undocumented. However, the two artists were cinematically conjoined via their shared passion for the Dominican-born 1950s Hollywood star, Maria Montez, the so-called ‘Queen of Technicolor’. Headlining a string of lavish costume-adventure films set in exotic locales, Montez enjoyed a brief period of popular success, though little critical respect. But both Smith and Tavel venerated her for the transparency of her performances, and for the qualities of role-playing and fantasy-projection she exuded. Constituting an important part of their friendship, their devotion to Montez would soon manifest itself in their own work, in Smith’s famous article, “The Perfect Filmic Appositeness of Maria Montez”, as well as in his films, and in Tavel’s scripts for stage and screen (many of which would star the not-coincidentally named Mario Montez).
–Sunday, December 20 at 7:00 & 8:45.

Tethered

 

On the one side of the street I thought someone was walking a pigeon. I thought, That's a fucking stupid thing to be doing, until I looked to the other side of the street and someone was walking a child. 

The pigeon turned out to be leash-less. 

The kid was leaning in the gutter suspended only by the harness that his mom was holding with her fist raised in the air so that Junior would not be directly in the muck of the gutter, but merely staring at it from a few inches above, his arms flailing indicating that he wanted to be one with the muck, screaming at it and lunging for it only to be pulled back by his mom who was window shopping. 

The kid kept going, "Uhhhhh. UHHHHHHH. UhhhHHHHHHHHH," as it was pulling away from the mother but she didn't blink. 

Her forearms must be huge.

A Letter To The New York Times

My name is Justin Skrakowski. I am a movie lover. I have always been a movie lover. My earliest memories are of film.
When I read a movie review I don't want to know the fucking end of the movie. I don't even like seeing movie posters because I feel like they give away so much. In fact, I want to know as little about the movie as possible. Maybe some production notes or interesting factoids about how difficult it was to get distribution, but I don't want to know the whole movie.
Maybe think about splitting your reviews into two sections: one for people who have not seen the movie and one for people who have. All I want to know BEFORE I see a movie is whether I should see it in the first place, NOT the ending of the film.
As in the case of Antichrist that hack A.O. Scott gives away the whole movie in the first paragraph. How this makes it to print I will never understand. Or, if you are going to do this do what imdb does and give a SPOILER ALERT. I know this doesn't make your rag look as pristine or professional as you might like but neither does ruining a film for a potential viewer. I think this actually makes you seem LESS professional because you have no clue who your audience is.
As for me I was lucky enough to see Antichrist at the midnight viewing last night before I read the  terrible ill-informed review by your terrible ill-informed reviewer.
Let it be known that your reviews are for my second column movie reviews for people who have ALREADY SEEN THE MOVIE and not for POTENTIAL VIEWERS.
Until this problem (and don't think it's not a problem because it is) is fixed, I will never read another nytimes movie review as long as I live.
So in summary (or a new beginning)

Dear New York Times,

Get your act together.

With disdain and contempt,
Justin Skrakowski

Zombieland (2009)

Director Ruben Fleishcer
Country USA
Runtime 80 Minutes
Dead Life 9/10

The first person in a movie I was ever super fucking jealous of was Edward Furlong. I mean like real jealous. Like "Jessie's Girl" kind of jealous. First off, if you don't remember, Terminator 2 was the most hyped, and at the time the most expensive movie ever made. Now, we know that this doesn't necessarily make for the greatest movie of all time, but in a time before Titanic this did in fact mean that you were about to see the greatest movie ever. And you know what? It was. It was the greatest fucking movie of all time. It had CGI that didn't suck, the T1000's hands could turn into knives or crow bars and he stabs the stepdad through the mouth while he's drinking milk. There are apocalypse daydreams that could make any 10 year-old question existence and envision the end of the world obsessively, but more than anything, ANYTHING, Edward Furlong got to hang out with Arnold Schwarzenegger. THE Arnold Schwarzenegger. Before you knew anything about politics and he ruined California, he was the most incredible man in the universe... He was Mr. Universe! He had muscles and he talked cool and he fucking killed Predator! How did this kid, this squeaky-voiced kid about my same age even get the chance to be in this movie? My parents sure have failed a lot, but how do you not even know how to get your kid into auditions to meet Arnold Schwarzenegger? I didn't have to be in the movie, I just wanted to meet Arnold.

I had all the press stuff, the novelization, the comics, the production magazine. But after I saw the movie I couldn't even look at this stuff anymore because it filled me with such jealous rage that I did not get to hang out with Arnold and Edward Furlong did that I thought I might murder him if I ever saw him.

The only other thing in life I get this jealous of is people in zombie movies. I want nothing more than for the dead to walk the earth. Lord, if you're listening, and you are a kind and gentle God like I know you to be, then you will smite all the assholes that I hate with a plague of unholyness that the world never thought possible in which the dead roam the earth and I get to hit their awakened corpses with baseball bats. DO YOU HEAR ME GOD? YOU ALMIGHTY FUCKSTICK! YOU NEVER DO SHIT FOR ME YOU ASSHOLE! IF YOU WANT ME TO KEEP BELIEVING AND I KNOW MORE THAN ANYTHING YOU WANT SOMEBODY LIKE ME TO BELIEVE IN YOU THEN YOU WILL MAKE THE DEAD ROAM THE EARTH! YOU HEAR ME! Thank you and amen.

If I wasn't so jealous of the people in this movie I would have given it a 10. My jealousy took a point away. I am not above my emotions. I might marry this movie. Then divorce it out of jealousy and then pine for it again and have a lengthy court battle to determine what's mine.

The Yes Men Meet The Dead Living: My Interview With Mike Bonanno

The Yes Men are the kind of guys you wished you were. They have beliefs coupled with action. Thought coupled with compassion. Nerves of steel and skeletons of gold and giant balls... Survivaballs.
I was lucky enough to get a few minutes to talk to Mike Bonanno of the Yes Men, the funniest dudes on the most serious mission, on a particularly noisy Sunday afternoon.
Get mad as Hell and check out their newest movie, The Yes Men Fix The World.

Mike Bonanno: Hello?

Justin: Mike?

MB: Yes.

J: Hi, this is Justin from Night of the Dead Living. How are you?

MB: Justin, excellent. I can hear you. How are you?

J: Good. I just saw the movie recently and I really – I was really happy with what you guys are doing and what you guys have done. I saw The Yes Men when that one first came out [street noise] – wait, where are you?

MB: I’m on the street in Brooklyn, hang on for a sec let me put my daughter down, she’s on my shoulders. [Talks to daughter]
Hello. Let’s talk.

J: The first thing I noticed about the movie was – I thought that you guys seemed very underwhelmed after each event, after each hoax. Were you displeased with what was happening, with the outcomes or was that just editing?

MB: You mean like that we basically don’t act – like we get all excited and say that we changed everything and that things are – is that what you mean, like it’s a series of upsets?

J: Yeah, there wasn’t too much high-fiving…

MB: I think that’s because after doing these things, for one thing it reflects a bit of an emotional low that happens anyway, you’re going through a bit of a postpartum moment [laughs]. You know after going through the process of getting all the adrenalin going and the energy and then afterwards, it’s a bit of an anticlimax afterwards. And I think it reflects that and it also reflects the reality of being an activist where you do things and you think they make a difference but you can never quite be sure and you feel almost cheated in your mission.

J: Are you constantly looking forward to the next thing or after each event are you done for a little bit or is it never done?

MB: Usually the events come to us, so sometimes we have two or three going at once and sometimes we have nothing for a while. I mean it would be a relief to have not have anything to do for a while to be totally honest. Because you know we’ve been at this as if it were a full time job for years now – without breaks – and we both have full time jobs at the same time. So you know how it is, it’s that kind of thing where you just get tired and so you need a break but then opportunities that you just can’t refuse keep coming up. You know, like the BBC – you think, Okay, now I’m really gonna take a break. Which the last time we released a movie we had just finished a series of pranks that took us years to pull off and that we’re working on really hard and then finally the movie’s out and we think, Now we’re gonna take six months off now, and then we get an email from the BBC asking us to be on their show – the opportunities present themselves and we feel a sense of obligation to our… craft [laughs]. To this sort of activist goal that we just keep doing it anyway. Hopefully we’ll be rested at some point but there’s always things coming up that you just have to – and it is fun, too - there are parts of it that are really restful. I mean even though we worked our asses off and we’re up 24/7 for weeks to do the New York Post project, it was really fun. It wasn’t a lot of really hard work banging your head against the wall like making a movie and getting it out there can be, because there’s just so much to do, there’s all kinds of weird legal work to do, there’s all kinds of – just working out the structure and working with a lot of people to make something happen. Raising money, it’s all very tedious and difficult.

J: You just called this a craft, are you worried about at one point getting too much press and you won’t be able to have this as your craft anymore? That you’ll be too recognizable?

MB: I’m not worried about that at all, because of all the other directions we can take it in. The newspapers are just one example of a kind of creative activist project that uses a lot of the same ideas that we’ve used in our lives. And the other thing is that we can – of course we can get other people involved. It doesn’t have to be us doing these things, it could be anyone. And there are certainly other people out there who are actually good at the types of things – they have the skills that would be necessary to do what we do even better, let’s put it that way. They were essentially working on the backend, and they were doing this sort of design work like the acting and that sort of thing and we were just working out sort of helping out with architecture… you know we might end up with a better result than we’ve gotten already. Because there’s nothing special about the way we act, me and Andy, we’re not good actors [laughs]. So when we go in front of an audience it’s not that we can pull it off because we’re incredible public speakers or something. It’s just because of the confidence of the people that’s been established and they think that you’re somebody important, so everybody hangs on your every word simply because they think that you’re super important.

J: How do you get something like a fake Dow Chemical web site up and running and not busted – how does that work?

MB: That is actually really pretty – in that particular case it was more complicated than usual. The usual way that it happens is Andy uses paint software or one of those other softwares to just rip off a website and then change the text where appropriate or change a few photos and then repost it at a domain of our choosing, one that’s usually similar to the corporate domain. So that’s the usual way – he also wrote a piece of software a few years back with another person – another group called plagiarist.org and that software is called Reamweaver, and it was like a way of automating that process. It’s basically a software you could set up – you could point it at the website and then it would automatically critique that…

J: Do you think, now recently the ACORN thing that just happened, do you think this is the new journalism or do you think people have been doing this all along or do you think you guys are perfecting it?

MB: I definitely don’t think, I mean if it wasn’t journalism we’d be making it – I don’t know if you saw the op-ed piece that we wrote about the ACORN thing, what the amazing thing about what those people did in relation to ACORN is that congress actually acted on it. If congress had been acting on some of these things that we’d been, let’s say revealing [laughs], some of these sort of sting operations, and con games that we’ve been playing, then we would see a much more accountable corporate sector than we currently do. We would see major corporations losing their funding not just an organization that’s trying to help working families afford their homes. That situation sort of points out something really interesting – that’s evidence that this is becoming more of a hot-button way of acting for activists, whether right-wing activists or leftie-activists. The interesting thing there then becomes, in our estimation, how the public and how the government actually reacts to that information. It seems totally absurd that the government actually responded to that case by taking away funding of ACORN, but sure, if they’re gonna do that if they’re gonna get all righteous about it, someone’s really fixed the problem everywhere there’s corruption, we’re all for that. You may knock out a few ACORN employees, but along with it I hope they’ll be taking basically the entire banking sector, basically the entire fossil fuels industry, all of the half thousand relationships with the government and all of the subsidies that they get are going to have to go… so, yeah, we applaud it.

J: Is there a line between altruism and for yourself, where you want credit for this, or for helping things like this along? Is there a line there?

MB: Not really, you know, the credit thing we don’t really care about. If it makes a difference that’s what matters. One example of a place where we kind of didn’t give a shit about credit is in the case of the acts we did with Dow taking responsibility for the Bhopal catastrophe, we realized before we did it that it was going to create this kind of bad press for us, because of the false hopes issue. The idea that we’d be raising false hopes with the Bhopal victims was something we were easily aware of, but we did it anyway because we realized that through the activist goals of the project it didn’t matter what people thought of us – if they’d thought that what we’d done was bad or if they hated us because we did it, because the goal there was to get in the news the fact that the 20th anniversary of the Bhopal catastrophe was happening and that Dow Chemical should be held responsible for cleaning up the mess there. So, in a way it should have been pretty clear, pretty straightforward.

J: It seems a lot of the press - even though you guys are bringing these things to light - they want to make you the bad guys for these things…

MB: They do, they do, and that’s their choice you know a lot of times they’ll either have editorial pressure or they’re writing things to fit – you know, they’ve written the story in advance. That happened in New Orleans where we were reported as having created more false hopes among the victims there even though none of the victims had heard about the prank as a real thing, none of them thought the Department of Housing was actually going to be fixing public housing again at all and we knew there was no reason for them to think otherwise because we raided a conference full of contractors not full of public housing residents. And it wasn’t carried live in the media and reported on so it was just reported on as a prank. Even though the media reported that public housing residents were outraged, it worked because they were there on the site while we were doing the mock reopening of it and they were applauding it. So, yeah sometimes people have written their stories already and sometimes they already know what they want to write and they just write it anyway.

J: How do you feel about those words, “Prank” and “Prankster”? To me it just seems so minute compared to what you guys are doing, how do you feel about that?

MB: Well thank you, I appreciate that and we do need a new word. And I don’t know what it is exactly we talked about using other words like “Hacktivism” – I like the word Hacktivism, generally you think of computer hacking instead it’s like reality hacking. And then there’s culture jamming, and culture jamming is also quite specific and I think in some ways because of Adbusters’ influence it began to develop a bit of – there’s often this kind of attitude that goes with it that’s kind of too cool for school. So we’re trying to avoid that one as well because it’s sort of – we use it still because it’s a good term and I like that sentiment and I think that it does describe pretty well some of the things that we do, but at the same time we need a new term, you’re right, and there’s got to be a better term than prank.

J: Prank sounds too cutesy like you guys are putting a whoopee cushion under somebody, and it’s all over the press release too, and it just doesn’t fit to me at all…

MB: That’s a great point and we’re not going to do it anymore now that you mention that it’s all over the press release, I think we now need to come up with something else.

J: That struck me as very odd and very ill fitting.

MB: Thank you, I appreciate hearing that, we gotta fix that.

J: Hacktivism, is that preferred? Will that do for now?

MB: Yeah, I think recently I’m beginning to see what we do as - trading terms - the world of direct action protest, it’s just that our direct action protest isn’t what you typically think of like with a blockade where you lock down and when you go and sit in a tree to keep it from being cut down, but still more of direct action. What we’re doing when we release this film is to really try to encourage as many people as possible to really get active. Especially young people who are frustrated with the idea that they’re going to inherit this mass of problems that the generation before them is creating, and the generation before them isn’t changing the laws to help keep those problems from happening at an accelerated rate like weather change… so they should be really pissed off.

J: Do you feel that things are too polarized now for any discourse? To me you guys are almost declaring war. I feel like it’s us against them now, or in the case of your movie, it’s us against them instead of “let’s sit down and talk about this” it’s, “You’re a fool, we’re going to reveal that.”

MB: I think always, there is always room to sit down and talk but basically you also need to find where the edge is so that you can find the middle. And right now the middle of the debate as it’s expressed in the United States is actually oblivion. The middle commits us to genocide for a major part of the world’s population. And we feel responsible for showing that. And if they can sell campaigns by corporations on the far right who pull the wool over our eyes and do not allow people to have the tools to make a decision about whether we want a future in which billions of people die – right now the latest reports say that we can expect a four degree rise in temperature in the next 50 years – and that doesn’t sound like much, you think, Oh it’ll be 90 instead of 86, that’s the way it feels, but when you actually look at the science there what it means is that there’s a lot of  growth and massive things that are happening, things that are occurring that are going to wipe out a certain segment of the population’s homes and their food supply – it’s not like everyone’s going to die in tsunamis although their will be more of them apparently because the earth’s crust is so relatively unstable, despite what we might think about rock. I read an article in The New Scientist yesterday about this, so we’ve gotta start predicting that billions of people will be displaced with resulting wars and death on a massive scale. By not acting we’re complicit in a kind of – it’s not genocide – it’s just mass murder. If we know that this is going to happen and we don’t stop it, we’re accessories to this huge crime. That’s why I’m saying the time for defining the middle - we better define a pretty extreme edge in order to determine where the middle actually is because the middle has been corrupted by the people in power right now – the corporations with deep pockets - who just want to keep exploiting things at everybody else's expense.
Of course there are plenty of people who are true believers that climate change isn’t happening and we get emails from them everyday, and if they’re right then Hallelujah, that’s fantastic, but there’s a preponderance of evidence to suggest that they’re not and if we don’t work to prevent this than the consequences are so much more dramatic than just letting it happen.
I guess that’s a very long winded answer but in the 60s would there have been such popularity for Martin Luther King if there hadn’t been other people further over like the Black Panthers and Malcolm X, who were defining the edge of the civil rights movement. So in order for white people to embrace Martin Luther King they needed some people further over who – other voices that enabled them to determine where they could find accessible middle ground.

J: How do you feel about irony?

MB: I enjoy it, I think my generation was probably the Irony Generation, you went to college in the late 80s early 90s and everybody was in super-ironic mode [laughs].

J: Do you feel that irony is the new apathy?

MB: I do feel like it was apathetic and I actually think there’s a lot more chance now of making a change because I think post 9-11 that irony was out and that people were severe. Now I think irony isn’t acceptable anymore. It can be funny. But maybe it’s too simple for this moment. I mean The Onion is awesome; don’t we need to laugh while we’re doing these things? But at the same time irony alone doesn’t work. You need ironic elements with a sincere sentiment to work.

J: What was one of your first glimpses that you would be doing this, when did you see that this would be in your future?

MB: That’s a really, really interesting question, nobody’s asked that before… Well, I mean… yeah, I don’t know. When I was in high school I never imagined I would be doing similar things now, in high school me and my friends were sort of rebelling against the monotony of suburban living. We would do things at the mall to interrupt, we set up a restaurant one day in the parking lot where we got this big red carpet and rolled it out and served food in, we wore really shitty tuxedoes that we got at a second-hand store and we tried to serve people flaming Cabbage Patch dolls, that was the food that we had. We would light them on fire, pour lighter fluid on them and get people that were going to the mall to come to our restaurant. And of course we got kicked out, every time we would go to the mall we would get either – they would call the police or the security would kick us out. But, I mean I didn’t know why we were doing it, we were doing it because we were having fun, but it’s only now that I look back and I say, Oh yeah there was nothing else to do in that town because I live in this suburban wasteland and there’s nothing for teenage kids to do. We weren’t of drinking age, but we could drive and end up finding some way to interrupt that environment because we certainly weren’t going to go shopping at the mall and we weren’t going to really hang out there either because it’s too boring. In a way it was like – at that point I wasn’t going to look ahead and say that, Oh yeah, I’m going to make a career out of doing things like that and now I actually understand why I’m doing them, but now I can look back and say there was definitely a twinkle in my eye for what the future held NOTDL

Difficulty

In case you missed it the first time or are too lazy to click on the link, you can watch this modern day classic with us now.

A Mint Julep On A Porch Swing or Mattie Eats A Georgia Peach

This is from my newest guest blogger, my great friend Matt Bowdren. You might recognize him from our Youtube masterpiece, Difficulty. Mattie was stolen from me when some numbnuts in Georgia decided he would be good for grad school.

Dear Georgia,

I was walking home from downtown tonight and I got rushed by a guy who hugged me. He was yelling something in my ear, I’m sure it had something to do with the football game Georgia just lost. I thankfully couldn’t hear him because I had my southern hick shield on, which consists of my sweet ipod and sunglasses. This hick was hammered, granted so was I, but hicks suck. While he was hugging me, in my head I was screaming, “Hit him! Hit him!” I didn’t do it of course because unfortunately there were four of them and I’m a big ol’ pussy.

I overheard someone at the bar I was at tonight say, “Sure you could move to New York City, but you’d want to come back to Athens right away.” What a motherfucking asshole. Obviously this kid has never been anywhere cool in his life. Who in their right mind (other than me apparently) would leave the coolest place in the world, the place where everything happens, and move to some back woodsy college town? The people here are so confused. Every person I see that’s drunk or stoned or homeless or doing something different than being an upper class white southern gentleman, some frat guy in khaki shorts or a sorority girl with a quarter of a brain says, “Welcome to Athens!” Shut. The. Fuck. Up. There is nothing fantastic about what you’re seeing, nothing new. It happens in every other city that is actually real all day every day and people don’t need to comment on it because it’s a fucking fact of life. ‘welcome to Athens’ my ass. People here talk about Athens, Georgia like it’s some big secret that the rest of the country – not wasting their lives – have never figured out. Let me tell you something, NO ONE gives a shit about Athens, Georgia. Not your friends, your family, or your government, no one needs to because in the grand scheme of things the only thing that seems to have ever come from the Captain Morgan, money soaked shit hole, are a couple of indie rock bands that sucked from the start.

Side note – three different people today told me they had no idea who T. Rex was. Go fuck yourselves.

When I first came here everyone told me how beautiful women from the South are.

Nope.

It’s not that they aren’t attractive – it’s just that they look and act like they have never been fucked. Now, I’m not talking they are virgins, I’m saying they have never been absolutely F-U-C-K-E-D. Wham, Bam, Thank you Ma’am Fucked. They don’t walk with their hips, they move like they are locked. It’s not sexy; it looks like they probably cry. Often. Not sure where I’m going with this, but it’s not sexy to look at a woman and feel like you’d have to teach them everything. It should be good from go.

Let me say something else about the South. If I get one more goddamn smile from some one I don't know I am going to hit the roof. Seriously, only here, only in this town can you get this 'gosh darn' interest in people shopping for groceries, or talking on my phone. It's not like I am standing in public masturbating or killing a small animal, yet still people walk by and stare at me like I am a crazed serial killer. Seriously in any real world situation (i.e anywhere except Athens, GA) some one would stab them in the face.

Which is what I want to do. Daily.

People keep telling me I'll get use to it, but here's the thing. I don't want to get used to it, I don't want to like it. I really enjoy hating shit, and I swear if that ever changes - if I ever become a southerner - someone please, punch me in the sack.

Love,

Matt Bowdren