A few nights ago I watched American Hardcore, a documentary film about the hardcore scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I didn’t ever consider myself a hardcore fan but did listen to the Circle Jerks, Black Flag, and especially Bad Brains. I just didn’t know they were a scene, or what it was about - I listened to it after it was over. The film is good, and gives a nationwide perspective on the nuanced scene - from San Diego to New York and Boston to Washington. It even credits Vancouverites for coining the term “Hardcore” - go Canada!

Somewhere along the line was a 6-second or less spot featuring artist Matthew Barney as himself, who as far as I can tell was not in the hardcore scene (he was 16 when it pretty much fizzled out in 1983). He is given billing as one of the film’s stars, and his reason for being in the film is strangely not explained via Lower Thirds. Band members, their friends, promoters, journalists, and a photographer who documented the scene all figure prominently. Barney seems plopped in without any context. He grew up in Idaho, a state which didn’t figure prominently in Hardcore, and the scene’s violence and angst seem at odds with Barney’s public profile of football player - turned J. Crew model - turned sculptor. As far as I can tell, his only relationshp with it is from Cremaster 3’s scene in which 2 hardcore bands battle while Barney climbs through the Guggenheim. Frankly his entrance into the film was so distracting that I didn’t pay attention to the next few minutes while I waited to comprehend what had just happened. Once a star, always a star.

Speaking of Matthew Barney, New York artist Eric Doeringer has a funny mock fan site called Cremaster Fanatic which I always secretly want to call “Cremaster Fantastic”.

In Halifax last month, my friend David Clark showed me this video on Youtube. Having screamed my heart out for days while recording sound for my Screaming video, I find the story fascinating:

In a scene from the 1951 Warner Bros. film Distant Drums there is a scene where soldiers are wading through a swamp in the everglades. One of them is bitten and dragged underwater by an alligator! Six short screams for that scene were recorded later, and the sound effect was labelled “man getting bit by an alligator, and he screams.” One of those screams was used for the scene.

After Distant Drums, the recording was archived in Warner Brother’s sound effects library, and re-used in many of their productions. Up until the mid-70’s, the scream recording was used exclusively in Warner Bros. productions, including Them!, Land of the Pharaohs, The Sea Chase, Sergeant Rutledge, PT-109, and The Green Berets. In A Star is Born, the scream is heard twice - one of the times because a scene with the scream in Charge at Feather River is playing in a screening room.

Sound effects fan Ben Burtt noticed the same distinctive scream reoccurring in a lot of movies. He made a film with friends, called The Scarlet Blade, borrowing the scream from another film’s sound track and including it on his own. Years later Ben Burtt was hired to create sound effects for Star Wars, and had access to the sound effects from several movie studios. While at Warner Bros. he found the original Distant Drums scream - which he called “Wilhelm” after the character that let out the scream in Charge at Feather River.

Ben adopted the scream as a personal sound signature, including it in all the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films, among others. Richard Anderson, another sound editor, also continued the tradition, including the scream in the films Poltergeist, and Planet of the Apes. Other editors have used it in Toy Story, Hercules, Pirates of the Caribbean, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Fifth Element, and Tears of the Sun. It became an easter egg for film junkies.

Although it has never been available in any commercial sound effects library, the recording has made it around the sound community through editors who appreciate its history. Only a few studios have the master of the Wilhelm, but because the clear scream can be found in a few films - such as the Judy Garland version of A Star as Born, it has been borrowed for projects by other studios. It also has been used in TV shows - including The X-Files, animations including Family Guy, commercials for Dell and Comcast, video games, and theme park attractions.

The Wilhelm Scream - listen for it in films near you!

You can see a massive list of films featuring the Wilhelm Scream here.

Fog, mist, and haze, oh my!

It’s either my double Newfie ancestry or my fascination with horror plots - but I think I’m in love, or lust. Who needs an iPhone when you have a Falcon Fog machine??

A few nights ago, I watched Jesus Camp, a documentary by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady about a Christian training camp for children in North Dakota. The preacher and her crew use metaphors of war and fear to ignite passion and political fervor in this veritable army of tiny preachers, evangelists, and religious warriors. It is far more disturbing than any of the horror films I’ve seen lately, including the camping themed Friday the 13th, The Blair Witch Project, and Sleepaway Camp.

The most astonishing scenes are the children’s veneration at the feet of a life size cardboard likeness of smiling George Bush, as though he were Jesus himself and the children the original mourners; and the rapture of young children who babble in tongues and convulse on the floor - faces streaming with tears. The children in the film are bright, but terribly sheltered and warned against the wrongs of science, and there is not much choice offered in this ideological path.

I can’t remember the last time I watched a film that had to be paused so often for discussion. Fortunately the rental allowed this punctuated viewing. The indoctrination and mis-education of children under the age of 13 by their parents and others in positions of trust and power, in the name of “taking back America for Jesus” (as if that were conceptually possible), is heartbreaking. The film is inherently objective and non-judgmental, a generosity on the part of its filmmakers.

My solo show in Vancouver opened at Third Avenue Gallery on May 1, and will run through May 31. Minutes by foot from Granville Island, Third Avenue was awash in pink from blossoming trees all last week.

Including work from the past five years which can best be described as culture-jamming, the exhibition also features 2 new videos, Superfan and Staring Contest with Brad Pitt. I finished editing the latter a couple of hours before the show opened, the video equivalent of hanging a wet painting. The sweat was dripping from my brow.

From the press release:
“Superfan stars Jillian Mcdonald riding in vehicles with costars Billy Bob Thornton, Vincent Gallo, and Donald Sutherland. Despite their attempts at conversation, the trio of male leads cannot shake her concentration on the Superbowl game. Staring Contest with Brad Pitt finds Mcdonald and Hollywood’s leading heartthrob locked in an endless gaze of a familiar childhood game. In To Vincent with Love“Mcdonald inserts herself digitally into scenes from Vincent Gallo’s film Buffalo 66” playing the ingénue opposite his socially awkward male lead. In Me and Billy Bob, she digitally manipulates romantic scenes from Hollywood films starring actor Billy Bob Thornton, creating a soft critique of celebrity obsession.”

Thank you to Michael Bjornson and Camille Graham for all their support and hard work on the installation!

According to Mint, the web stats application I use, the most popular search term that brings people to my site, following various right and wrong spellings of my name, is “Vulva”. Considering there is only 1 mention of Vulvas on my site - the above intervention titled “Auto Sex Change Operations” for which I placed “Vulva” stickers on hundreds of parked Volvos in New York City years ago, I can only conclude that people are searching far and wide to expose the vulvas.

Josie McCoy is a painter who divides her time between London and Valencia, Spain. Beckley and I met her in 2006 in Valencia when she introduced us to far better cuisine than we were able to find on our own, and a deceptively alcoholic orange cocktail called Waters of Valencia. Her paintings are stunning, beautiful, and eerily unsettling - watery cyan flesh mimics the haunting glow of the TV screen. They memorialize the glamourous beauty of screen actresses that seems at once temporary, translucent and as artificial as painting itself. These perfect close-up moments where ripe red lips, expression-filled eyes, and flawless skin prevail is how the star struck remember their screen idols - far from the trashy paparazzi shots in supermarket tabloids.

Visit Josie’s website for more images. The recent painting above, of Sun Kwon, from ABC’s “LOST”.

I confess I love the game. I never really get tired of positioning those falling, brightly coloured pieces. I don’t have to kill anyone, and occasionally I catch myself fitting tetris shapes against the tops of buildings in the sky.
Today I was perusing some fan fiction on fanfiction.net and came across a juicy tidbit about a girl who falls in love with a tetris piece. I’ve been reading a fascinating academic book titled “The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media”, edited by Lisa Lewis. In it, Joli Jenson offers a fan vs aficionado comparison that situates the two as versions of the same thing, varying mainly in class and economy. John Fiske heralds the productivity of fans, “Popular culture is produced by the people out of the products of the cultural industries” (p. 37). Indeed.

In related news, the image above is part of a product line made by Brave Space in Brooklyn, whose design is solid but colour choice pales. I noticed the suggested configurations, except this one, all crown the shelving owner a tetris wiz - few blank spaces here

I really hope BB is playing the role of a Vegas performer and isn’t on the Las Vegas circuit himself. I’m not sure what to make of this photo, grabbed from the interwebs, it’s too disturbing.

>>update, February 24: This is a photo of Billy Bob in his new band The Boxmasters which in live performance conjures television variety shows and electric hillbilly music.

After many days of installing my show at 1708 Gallery in Richmond, Virginia, we had an opening reportedly attended by some 3,000 people. Many of them lined up to share the Billy Bob love by getting tattooed, including the little one pictured here. Billy Bob fans come in all sizes. Thanks so much to all the fabulous people of Richmond who spent endless hours with me on the installation and planning. Especially Brad Birchett, Vaughn Garland, and Diego Sanchez. Also Ron, Alison, Katherine, Matt, Garth, Curtis, Justin, and Jessi - you guys rock! If I am forgetting anyone, thank you thank you. It is great to come to a city like Richmond and find such a generous and vibrant art community that is this welcoming and that much fun!

See more at 1708 Gallery’s blog!

Images of the exhibition: