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Extraordinary. Not only was it a trenchant critique of its time and a metacommentary on the faculty of seeing and the medium of film, but also prescient of the soon-to-come doors-of-perception cleansing with which LSD was to douse the culture. Worth seeing just for the pink 1950s optical instruments and the partygoers doing the Twist naked in the main character’s enhanced vision.

also a brilliant video by Dani Leventhal as part of a program curated by Peggy Ahwesh, ADVENTURES CLOSE TO HOME, featuring mainly young women filmmakers. I enjoyed the other films as well, but Dani’s was a standout. In the Q and A afterwards, she said she had been influenced primarily by sculpture and drawing, and that made sense, but the edits really seemed like poetry to me.

Also on the program was Otis Turner’s THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ from 1910, which Peggy cited as an early influence, and I found this VERY interesting as my own last two movies have used images from the series of early Oz films. I stumbled on the DVD on a trip to Cape May last summer: what a treasure trove! And here it is (part 1)…

These callipygian longings.
Not to have seen you naked =
the greatest injustice known
to man! But don’t assume
that I am writing about
you.

Stunned daffy energy
morphosing on the lipid
pleasure of revolution
in tartan tights. I love
it when men tell me what
to do I love the timid crust
of need on the surface
of false order. There.
You have your orders.
Go.

Life beribboning
itself with more
and more and more life:
then twisting into its
same old spiral.
In semicostume as always
prying the sticky lens
from the bioglobe.
Opinionated. Injured.
All the little…
comptrollers…

I can’t ketchup to you
to sweetly relish
your interiorities:
not even with all this
pelvic mayonnaise. The poems
are the crucial chutney
to the bland daily “special.”
Nothing else matters,
not the wasabi
of your personality,
the coarse mustard
of my mannered
suggestiveness,
or the gooey duck sauce
of these noxious phantasms.

Sol Lewitt wrote:

New materials are one of the great afflictions of contemporary art. Some artists confuse new materials with new ideas. There is nothing worse than seeing art that wallows in gaudy baubles. By and large most artists who are attracted to these materials are the ones who lack the stringency of mind that would enable them to use the materials well. It takes a good artist to use new materials and make them into a work of art. The danger is, I think, in making the physicality of the materials so important that it becomes the idea of the work (another kind of expressionism).

I find this quotation very entertaining. What exactly is this “danger” that he refers to?

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What else to wear to the zoo but leopard print? Faux, of course. OF COURSE.

She seems a little nonplussed, but isn’t she majestic? Her fur is REAL.

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lately I’m a little like a car whose driver is slamming too hard on the accelerator and the brakes, accelerator and brakes… where’s the agency in that? by which I mean I’m not the driver.