phamos

i recently bought the book associated with matthew barney's cremaster cycle, a piece of bizarre video art that has mesmerized me for some time now. i did not get to see the entire cycle when it was playing at the guggenheim, so i am reading the essays in the book to help me understand the underlying themes and get some basic descriptions of what's really happening in these films. the first essay deals with the various short films that barney made leading up to cremaster; the prefaces, as it were. i though i would share with you some of my favorite segments from this essay dealing with Barney's short film "OTTOshaft".

first up, an interaction between protagonist jim otto, former member of the oakland raiders, and barney playing a perspective on harry houdini, called the Character of Positive Restraint.

"with the sterile, incubator-like garage urging them on, otto and the Character of Positive Restraint plot to hijack the hubris pill and force it to achieve its most distant horizon of possibility, which is imagined in the form of a bagpipe. taking the pill hostage, they induce a metabolic transfer of energies. following a biological model of digestion, they impel the pill to travel from glucose (the pill's existing state of potential) to hard candy (a glucose-sucrose blend) to pure sucrose. After passing through petroleum jelly, it moves on to the starches -- tapioca -- and then meringue. If they are able to make it reach the state of pound cake, a complex carbohydrate, with the penultimate addition of eggs, the bagpipe will play 'amazing grace' and thereby communicate with god."

otto and the bagpipe move on to encounter his former manager, al davis. yes, these are actually jim otto and al davis in these movies.

"otto's character is further fractured or triangulated into a chorus of three bagpipers wearing the black watch tartan, uniform of the british monarchy's own military band. al davis joins them in full highlander regalia. the Character of Positive Restraint meets the challenge and dons a disguise. transforming himself into a bagpiper, he wears the dress steward tartan...the hubris pill, in its successive metabolic states, is passed back and forth between the two teams. [does this just mean they're tossing around a pound cake?] at one point in this narrative, two kilts, each representing an opposing side, are sewn together with cord and petroleum jelly."

barney is obsessed with petroleum jelly. "in physiological terms, a bolus is a wad of ingested or digested food. here it serves as the title for a cast-petroleum-jelly dumbbell maintained by a refrigerated rack. the author described this inherently malleable, double-headed form as a 'mouthpiece that could also be inserted anally,' an action that would essentially 'close the circle' and seal off the body in a hermetic, perfectly self-contained state. in his video performance "field dressing (orifill)" barney emulated this condition by filling each of his body's orifices -- ear, nose, mouth, anus, penis -- with petroleum jelly." he also creates "cast petroleum-jelly exercize benches" and, in cremaster 4, "a narrow three-sided tunnell filled with bulbous protrusions and petroleum jelly...part intestine, part birth canal...[he] perserveres, contorting his body to pass through the constricted straits and swimming through the oppressive vaseline goo." ah, vaseline goo -- high art. and there's much, much more. hey, catherine deneuve's in it!

this may all just be total pretentious mumbo-jumbo, but it's intoxicating pretentious mumbo-jumbo. although all the goo is pretty gross.

i just made abby's birthday cd. and i screwed up the track listing in the liner notes. so abby, when you get the cd, do a plus-one for every song past four-and-a-half. simple, right?

i got to play with collage to make the liner notes. (i say "liner notes" like there are any notes of substance. it's one page. track listing. done. i don't have the staples to make a booklet.) it's the one art form i'm even remotely good at, because it doesn't require me to draw/paint/otherwise create things from scratch. i'm very bad a making my hands recreate images i see in my mind, but i have fun with collage because it's color placement, verbiage, interesting photographic images mixed with pre-drawn/painted images...i enjoy it. unfortunately, my adhesive dispenser is broken, so i had to compile it with scotch tape. which looks rattier, but i compensated for that by making the theme of the cover very punk, so the d.i.y. look of tape is appropriate. and kinda cooly shiny. *sigh* well, at least it looks cool in the case.

and i gave up on trying to merge swoony songs with fun dancy hip hop. i figured abby already has all the same fun dancy songs as me, so it's all swoony, all the time. i used to be able to make really random mixes that integrated extremely diverse songs, but i think my brain has fried itself since high school and that particular skill is in remission.

whose bright idea was it to cast tommy lee on survivor?