In the picture below, Bella (left), Aaron Schuster (middle) and David Levine (right).

A: Why on earth did you eat that ten dollar bill? It can’t have tasted nice.

B: Don’t be gruff. Anything that falls on the floor is mine. Can I have a cookie now to change my mouth lining flavor? Can I? Can I?

A: What does it mean to be runt of the litter?

B: Stomped on lowest rung. Everyday fear-bath, nonstop bow-down. Wreathed in terror-reek that broadcasts you are last of the last. I don’t like to talk about this stuff…

A: OK. I just gave you a bath. Then you went and rolled in manure.

B: Will you barbeque soon? Will you let me lick the grill when it cools?

A: No, really. How come I get you all nice and clean and you immediately roll in something stinky?

B: Humans don’t get true grooming, which only takes place using the tongue. Toothpaste, mouthwash, and deodorant are what’s “stinky.” Soap’s revolting. Terrible invention. Why have it in your lamplit, carpeted, doorlocked lair? Dung is informative, complex—full of news flashes from the body’s interior. Shit’s an encyclopedia, volumes of urgent correspondence your organs wrote if only you knew how to read. What’s learnt from smelling shampoo? It just causes sneezing, erases articulate fumes. Bulldozes olfactory signposts. Washing is book burning.

A: How come you chew window blinds during thunderstorms?

B: Must break hard things with teeth—bite/ crunch/ tear when scared. Need escape hatch fast. Eat my way out.

A: Well, that makes a certain sort of sense. But why did you roll in the carcass of that dead seal when we took you to the beach at Morro Bay?

B: To transfer ghost-cloak of invisibility, silly. Death-smell lends protection. Winner of ripest warm day decay contest is not challenged by pack peers—billowing putrefaction blasts inspire respect and great kill-pride! Meat rot bouquet is prey-smell’s best medal. What don’t you understand in that?

A: Hmmm. And what motivated you to eat that postcard from Alex and chew up several of my Catholic saint statuettes?

B: Doesn’t make a lick of sense to me. THERE’S THE CAT! GET HIM! (races out of room.)

Text by Amy Gerstler
Image by Vivian Rehberg

>>> Thinking about starting an Arnold Schwarzenegger religion?

Someone dear sent me this link from the “Paul Lafargue Internet Archive”, a few weeks ago. The text was written in 1883.

Images: Archives from Oggiaro, Milano, Italy.

PS: Was the divine bull Apis–born of a virgin cow impregnated by the rays of the sun–not a statue ?

Mr. Oizo, aka French music producer and film director Quentin Dupieux, is a pretty successful French electro house musician, mostly known for his 1999 track, “Flat Beat” and his collaborations with labelmate Uffie. He is currently signed to French electro record label, Ed Banger Records.

His latest film “Rubber” was shown at the LUFF (Lausanne Underground Film Festival) last Saturday and tells a story about a tire that randomly wakes up in the middle of the desert and, “inspired by his telepathic abilities”, starts killing animals and humans.

I’m pretty sure that writing about RUBBER and trying to mine the oeuvre with words is a sure way of looking like an ass. And I’m even more sure that this is what makes it a great film.

First thing, the topic of the film is incredibly unimportant—it’s structure and style and words. Script, editing, coverage, and lighting are mastered to an incredible extent. Dupieux simply and accurately takes found objects (in RUBBER, realistic objects embedded in a surrealistic canvas) and arrange them for maximum disjunction.

Second thing, thoughtful silliness, wry humor, arch irony, and unexpectedly brutal violence create a weird “biosphere” where disjunction and disharmony become really addictive. Nothing flows together and apparently, ever will.

We heard an impressive series of nervous laughter in the theatre that night. It seemed that the fact that “nothing is beyond deconstruction” was very embarrassing. And perhaps, confusing. What exactly is there to do here with the “underground film festival” pointy-headed critical theories? Sundance Kid: “You just keep thinkin’, Butch. That’s what you’re good at.”

The film will be released in cinemas in November. Don’t miss it. And indeed, don’t miss the LUFF (generally speaking).

http://www.rubberfilm.com/

RUBBER OFFICIAL TRAILER ! from oizo mr on Vimeo.

On September 12, 2010, West performed a new song, “Runaway” featuring Pusha T, at the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards. Shortly after the performance, Kanye revealed he was working on a 35 minute short film based around the song. The movie is said to be “influenced by film noir and concerns a fallen phoenix whom he falls in love with”. The short filmed debuted consecutively on VH1, MTV, and BET on October 23. And here it is!

The Forum, subterranean womb of the primitive utopia of the Centre Pompidou, is to house a temporary structure developed in collaboration with a team of artists, publishers, musicians, labels, writers and curators of varying backgrounds. In this space once open to the city, this mechanical arena entirely dedicated to the experience of the present, Fun Palace offers a series of explorations at the margins of the past and present activity of the institution, of its hidden dimensions, in the gaps severing the heterogeneous discourses and acts that have inhabited the place.

Oral narratives, alternative legends, and forgotten or immaterial archives sketch an invisible and fragmentary history of the Centre. This mode of interpretation looks to the traces of unfinished experiments and of abandoned ideas that still haunt the institution. A prism that disperses the written history of the Centre into an ensemble of divergent elements, the Fun Palace speaks to that history’s blind spots and dead zones. Drawing on the shades of history and collective myth, the exhibition invents its deficits, putting into question the suspension of history that Swiss sociologist Albert Meister called – in a science-fiction story written in 1976, as the Centre began to rise from the ground – ‘The so-called utopia of the Centre Beaubourg’.

Curated by Tiphanie Blanc, Yann Chateigné Tytelman & Vincent Normand. Display by Stéphane Barbier Bouvet.

With Lars Bang Larsen, Delphine Bedel, Étienne Chambaud, Céline Condorelli, Dexter Sinister, Dolphins into the Future, Luca Frei, Karl Holmqvist, Junior Aspirin Records, Monster Island, Sarah Pierce, Michael Stevenson, Camille de Toledo and Tris Vonna Michell.

With appearances by Vito Acconci, Joseph Beuys, Daniel Buren, David Byrne, Louis Capet, Henri Chopin, Le Cinquième Département, Guy Debord, Destroy All Monsters / Cary Loren, Marcel Duchamp, Robert Filliou, Allen Ginsberg, John Giorno, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, Brion Gysin, Jonathan Horowitz, Pontus Hulten, Allan Kaprow, Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy, Mauro Lanza, Lefevre Jean Claude, Le Mur du Fond / Jean-François Bergez, David Markey, Gordon Matta-Clark, Albert Meister, Bruce Nauman, Giovanni Passannante, Raymond Pettibon, Cedric Price, Eliane Radigue, The Residents, Jean Rouch, Raymond Roussel, Philippe Seguin, Leslie Thorton, Lawrence Weiner and Frank Zappa.

“I’m always interested in what direction people put the jewellery on their hands.”

Jonathan’s approach to jewellery is as much about design as it is a way of cultivating identity and personal history. Having started at Eugene Lang with a joint major of philosophy and psychology and religion and finished with a degree in menswear at Parsons School of Design, Jonathan’s work comes from a strong intuitive core. “Ball Game” is the first collection under the Bevel line.

Mayan mythology seems to be at the centre of this collection- with a story behind each piece of jewellery- was that a starting point for the design process?

I was adopted at three months old, and felt an intense need as I grew up to construct my own cultural ancestry. The tale of Mayan civilization is something that resonated with me very early on and has since become a central element in my life, and the idea of a civilization that held so much power so long ago is another source of inspiration in my “States of Being…” to not only capture the human life cycle but one of a once-great civilization, from its inception to its ruin.
I feel like with this first collection, I am cementing my own identity. It feels very grounding. One’s choice in jewelry is by nature very personal, and to be able to create something and give it meaning and heritage is very satisfying. 

Which materials are you interested in exploring?

I’m starting to explore gold as a medium, in the future I would possibly like to work with stones. I like working with silver because the material is like a person, if you don’t love it, it will become blackened and dark, but with care and attention the brighter and the more lustre it will have.

Which are some of the artist or designers that inform your work?

I’ve always loved Francis Bacon. He’s always returning in some way or another. I love a lot of the visuals for Marilyn Manson, Ramnstein. The dark side of mythology is intriguing for me. And my motto has always been ‘dark things breed bright ideas’.

How would you like people to approach your jewellery pieces?

Jewellery is a very personal thing; overtime it can hold a lot of history. I love how things grow. You’ll start with anything perfect or what the person who’s telling you is considering to be perfect and then the more you wear it the more flavour it develops, the more it becomes a part of you and in that way it becomes more personal. For instance silver blackens overtime. Some pieces in the collection are intentionally blackened so the reverse process will happen; where the pieces will become brighter with wear; essentially polishing themselves overtime.

How do you see yourself evolving for the next collection?

The pieces from this collection just came into being, so if this is any indication, the designs for the next collection will just appear. My work grows from an organic process; I started doing jewellery because I had fallen in love with a jewellery designer. Love leads you in these different directions and can be a positive influence, if you let it.