shelflife by visitor

I’ve mentioned before that I was asked to create and gather work from material in my archive for the upcoming Sensational Fix touring Sonic Youth exhibition. Something I’d been meaning to make for a long time, but never got around to–until last week–was an impressionistic audio/video collage about the making of Harmony Korine’s Sunday.

I shot 3 hours of material the day Harmony made the video. That was over 11 years ago, and re-visiting such old footage is difficult. Different equipment, shooting styles, subject-focus… I get this one thing I want to make–it’s done in my head–been done for years–ready to encode, burn and rip–but I jog thru the footage and the fragments I’ve edited in my memory don’t exist on the tapes. I experienced them, but never recorded them. Maybe I misremembered them over time.

So, a simple 8-minute edit becomes this painful exercise in compromising memory while trying to convey some sense of the experience to a viewer. All the while, I don’t really want to convey the experience–at all. I never really do. I just want to frustrate people, so I’m not so isolated in my perplexed recollection. This is why I’ll never be a real filmmaker.

I’ve got no stories to tell. I’ve just got this compulsion to document things and these thoughts I reflect on while I re-examine footage. I lack a fundamental interest in structure and basically want a viewer to vicariously experience my high blood pressure, confusion and angina more than anything else. Always Seems To Move So Slow is representative of that process–but somehow, the jarring sound edit, lack of anchors and surreal, sensual and sensational subject matter make a looming aneurysm slightly endearing.

Maybe I’ll stream it after the opening on June 17th. For now, I leave you with stills.

“FIRST ISH    MARCH 1995 / MARK GONZALES    HARMONY KORINE” The ADULTHOOD zine was another Aaron Rose agitation. So much of the literature that Aaron’s released on Alleged Press has left an apparent impression on what exactly pop-culture tastemakers have chosen to plagiarize since the 90’s. Like that moment of confused discomfort that sweeps in waves about one’s body following a notable crunching of the testicles, ADULTHOOD has left a persistent mark on those groins displaced by its steel-toed wit.

ADULTHOOD rolled two brilliantly damaged minds into a stromboli of crack-mania and mushroom-sautéed-observation–glopped together with the odd mozzarella of intermittent imagery–like Stephen Hawking displaying a record album edited to read, “tap dance music” with images of a swastika and a male portrait drawn atop the text. 

The zine was also ripe with sage wisdom–gems–”I DON’T KNOW WHAT KINDA RELACHIONSHIP YOU EXPECKTED YOUR GIRLFRIENDS ONLY TWELVE”.  Harmony typed up a list of 80 rumors. They forever changed my opinions of Tom Petty, Jessica Tandy, Nick Nolte, Corey Haim, Nestor Almendros and Kate Moss. Six toes? Elongated vagina? Tonsil wrasslin’ your dying sister? A dirty fish tank? Hector? Rehab-lockdown skin-flute to the tune of a photo of River Phoenix hanged?

People spend a lot of time fishing for genius in the deepest trenches of our intellectual oceans. Mark and Harm have made it their life’s work to remind us that it’s easier to just splash around with it in the kiddie-pool.