In 1996, over the course of three days, 39 members of the UFO
and doomsday cult Heaven’s Gate
swallowed poison, put plastic bags over their heads and laid down on their
bunks to die. Dressed entirely in black, with patches stating that they were
members of ‘The Away Team’ (a Star Trek reference) their corpses were recovered
a couple of days later. The cult believed that the millennium would bring the
end of the world and decided to join the afterlife on their terms, perhaps in
order to direct the Rapture from heaven.
The cult all wore Nike Decade trainers, budget
range black and white shoes that they bought in bulk from the local K-Mart. These trainers feature heavily in the crime scene photographs, sticking out from the purple cloths and tarpaulins pulled over their bodies, an unwelcome advertisement for the
sports brand that had dominated the decade. Pissed off, Nike immediately withdrew
the Decade from sale, in hindsight a missed opportunity.
Just Do It clearly
does not mean mass suicide, it’s much less meaningful than that. All of which prompted me to think about what trainers I'd wear to kill myself. I eventually decided on a pair of Adidas All Blacks, a rather sleek shoe I wore a lot in the late eighties. They were discontinued some time ago, so I'm unlikely to commit suicide just yet. Which, actually, is fine by me.
Briskly ticking pretty much every box on my mental clipboard, Chosen Survivors
is a 1970s US sci fi drama set in a sealed military bunker which quickly becomes a
horror and disaster movie. The titular survivors arrive drugged and disoriented
by army helicopter, and are herded into the shelter by soldiers just a few
minutes ahead of a worldwide nuclear apocalypse. The race and gender balanced
group are from all walks of life, and are people prominent in their own fields selected
to be preserved for posterity, i.e. it’s going to be their job to repopulate
America (they’re all a bit too old for this, by the way, surely what you’d
really want is a few teenagers?).
The trouble with this deep shelter set in an ancient
cave system, however, is that the hole is already populated – with millions of vampire
bats – who are both pissed off at the intrusion and delighted that their larder
has been filled. What follows is messy, as (poorly) optically imposed bats feed
on middle aged character actors, some of whom fight back and some of whom just
flap and flip around until the bats empty them. It’s good fun. To observe as fictional entertainment, I mean,
I can’t imagine the reality of it would be anything other than nippy and unpleasant.
Here’s a spoiler: the best thing? It’s not even a real
nuclear war, it’s just a drill. Oh, the irony!
Teeny Deane, here's some rock an roll, Bubbu, hope you like em if you don't you're a cretin!! Ratfink*.
Chrome is not so much a band as an unexplained phenomenon. I don’t know
how they wrote these songs, how they performed them, or how they recorded them.
They seem to follow the classic film screenwriting edict of ‘come in late,
leave early’, so many of their songs are like blurred Polaroids: bits and
pieces in motion, indistinct edges, colours smeared and inchoate. The overall
result is as exhilarating as it is disorienting. Their music chops and changes
like a radio being tuned, ending abruptly, fading out or changing tack mid-song,
layered to overload with scuzzy riffs, wild noodling and wayward analogue electronics.
Sometimes they layer in screams, chuckles or maniacal laughter, ear-splitting buzzes
and sudden bursts of static or dialogue taped off the telly. Their subject
matter is from the pages of Philip K. Dick: mass surveillance, sinister media,
doppelgangers, terrorism, paranoia, time out of joint. The drums always sound
as if they are in a different room to the tape recorder.
My favourite Chrome album is their third, Half Machine Lip Moves,
perhaps the most perfectly Chrome-like of their peak output between 1977 and
1982 (they’re still going now, albeit in a revised form, having lost a founder
member along the way). It’s a record that sounds like a mix tape – it jumps
around in time and space, in time zones and space spaces, a hundred sonic ideas
hastily jotted down then crossed through, an album with both a laser sharp
focus and attention deficit disorder. Arrows point to new directions, new
sounds emerge. Everything sounds live and improvised, then laden with overdubs,
echo and lots and lots of compression, slightly chaotic, but often hypnotic and
adorned with sinuous guitar lines and squelches. It’s beautifully composed cacophony,
sheets of sound, metallic clangs and clatters, heavily treated vocals that hiss
about alienation, duplication, death and a ‘cold clammy bombing that will shit
on your town’. If the Red Army Faction had made a record, it might sound like
this, reeking of high explosive and petrol.
They’re probably my favourite band, and they are becoming more relevant as the world becomes more splintered and
confusing. I strongly recommend them to you if you want to listen to something
that will beat the hell out of your ears and head whilst making your heart and legs compulsively pump up and down. *Indented inscription on the cover of my secondhand copy of the album.
I like animals in general more than humans. That said, there are a number of humans who I would hold protectively in my hand if I were able to. None of us are just one thing, are we? Life doesn't work like that.
This moviedoesn't mess about. A monstrous alien lump, with a mouth full of terrible dentistry, crash lands on Earth near a small mid-western town and spends the rest of the film killing everybody he meets. This is, apparently, a close encounter of the sixth kind*. At first he uses his disintegrator gun which looks brilliant and is astonishingly effective. Later on, it uses its bare hands, clawing and clutching and chopping his victims into bloody bits and pieces, memorably popping the idiotic Mayor's head like a pimple.
Clearly a creature made of a form of flesh and some sort of bone, it's never quite explained why it isn't in any way affected by the five hundred or so bullets he has fired into him, but regardless of the science, it makes for a formidable threat who, like Odd Job, Ted Bundy or Jaws 2, can only be destroyed by the application of an enormous amount of electricity.
* i.e. death or injury is involved. A close encounter of the seventh kind involves interplanetary sex.
Apes aren't natural artists, although they clearly have the thumbs for it, their hands being far more complex than ours - and they have twice as many. A chimp might trace its shadow on a wall with a finger, but that's generally as far as they go in terms of drawing and painting, unless they are presented with the right equipment and lots of encouragement. The pictures here are by Julia, Bozo, Jessica and Lady, respectively, all chimpanzees showing great promise. I love the great apes. That's where the future lays - not only in art, but of humanity.
Alan Resnick is an American
comedian, performance artist, film maker and consciously terrible mime. He
first came to prominence with his Alantutorials, sixty six short films posted
to YouTube that both parodied and celebrated the modern phenomenon of people
making films of how to do stuff,
including simply opening boxes and showing you what’s inside. Resnick plays
Alan, a ‘little kid’ (with massive feet and hands) who uses his phone camera to
make short films in which, for example, he tells us how to put dirt in a box,
crush a can with a piece of wood, spin a salad with an electric drill, or to
glue spray painted coins to an external hard drive. Most of the films are only
two or three minutes long. The tutorials encapsulate the hollow nature of
YouTube: the obsession with gathering likes and subscribers, the impossible yet
oddly achievable dream of becoming an online star via a compulsion to create
content that is neither necessary nor needed. In some of the films, despite
being ostensibly in control of the process, Alan clearly doesn’t have anything
set up, and has to improvise, falling back on staples like lengths of wood,
dirt and ‘water’ that actually resembles antifreeze.
Resnick nails the nascent YouTube
style perfectly: ‘Hi Guys’ or, later, ‘Hi Tutorialheads’ in a soft, high
pitched voice. The films are not badly done, but they are clumsy and unprofessional.
Later on, they will descend into chaos. We never see Alan in person, just bits
of him. He makes the majority of his films on his phone camera, which causes
him problems as many of his tutorials require at least two hands, leading to a
great deal of tragicomic fumbling and his favourite expletive: ‘shoot!’.
The Alantutorials are not simply
clever parodies, they contain a narrative arc. After watching half a dozen or
so, it becomes clear that Alan is not an excitable child, he is an adult with
mental health issues, desperately trying to find some online validation. He
seems lost and alone, and although he sometimes achieves a kind of gleeful
hysteria (usually while being destructive), he is most often unfulfilled or
confused by his own films, prone to accidents and mistakes. Far from being an
expert, he is a rank amateur, not even skilled in the bogus activities he wants
to show us.
The turning point in the series
is when Alan teaches us how to expose the slats of the ceiling and rub the ensuing
dirt onto a bed. This act of destruction has serious consequences. The next
time we see him he is locked out of his room: cold, snivelling and waiting for
someone to come and help him. No-one comes, and Alan is forced to live in the
woods, scavenging for food and water and shelter. Despite these desperate
circumstances, Alan continues with his tutorials, although they now have a
feral, psychotic edge, full of blood and mud and the inexplicable actions of a deranged man in an altered state.
After an uncomfortable period of
mayhem, Alan is next seen locked in the back of a truck and then in what is
first assumed to be a hospital or asylum. But why are there Stanley knives on
the table, why is he allowed to collect his own urine in bottles, and who is
sliding a dollar bill under the door each time he makes a film?
The room becomes dirtier and
dirtier, and Alan becomes more and more unhinged. In the longest episode of the
series, Alan stomps about the piss bottle filled room in a filthy gown, talking
indistinctly to himself and his ‘best friend’, a figure he has fashioned out of
scuzzy looking dollar bills. We can’t hear what he is saying, and we can’t work
out what is happening other than that this perhaps represents Alan’s offscreen
reality: the way he spends his time when he isn’t thinking of his audience. In
the next film, his room is dark and more chaotic than ever. Whatever this
facility is, it has clearly now been abandoned.
A straightforward reading of the
Alantutorials is that they are challenging the evolution of YouTube from an
online platform for individual expression to a corporation owned site that
exploits raw talent in return for relatively small amounts of cash. Is Alan
kidnapped by a company who wish to use his tutorials to direct his audience
towards their own ends, their own products? And is his abandonment the result
of falling figures, or a drive towards a different demographic? Or is all of
this irrelevant, as what we are actually seeing is the inside of Alan’s head,
an elaborate and disturbing fantasy played out online on perhaps the darkest of
all social media channels, the place where irrational people feel most at home,
amongst conspiracy theories, convoluted commentaries, dubious political rants,
strange fetishism and compilations of cleavage shots from ‘Friends’. What
happens here defies interpretation: it’s insanity in all its grubby, self-harming,
self-soiling horror.
To further reinforce the nightmare, and if you can face it, read the comments on Resnick’s YouTube channel, an Escher-esque tumble of opinion
in which people express sympathy for Alan and are then lambasted by others for
not knowing that Alan is not a real person. But is this symptomatic of a
growing split in society? Those who care are criticised for not getting it,
those who do get it are superior and condescending. Just because Alan Resnick
is not Alan Tutorial, does this make the madness any less real? Is it art, or
is it artifice, and what does the fake Alan
say about the real Alan?
