“restructured meat product” … thats what you are to me.
Oh hi there..!
Just getting ready for Satan’s Birthday. What are you doing?
More animations with Ariel. We call it, “Blind Date”
Making cartoons with the kid is pretty damn fun. We made this little robot stomp out some yellow goo. She’s turning 17 and I’m turning 36 pretty soon, but together we’re just a couple of 8 year olds.
I stole this hat and I feel terrible about it.
Good ol’ fashioned leather bomber and tanker caps are very hard to find these days. I’m a sucker for the old school WWII military gear. This is the kind bomber cap I’ve been looking for for years. I never found it so I decided to make it myself. It is made from durable, yet pliable hand dyed rawhide and can arrive distressed or shiny and new. It has a cloth liner and hand set snaps on the front and back flaps. It’s fairly light weight and very comfortable, it even keeps ya pretty warm.
It has a rugged deconstructed look, yet the stitching is quite strong and durable. The straps are strong and functional. The cap comes with large hand made custom patches on the sides that can me made in various designs and motifs. Currently, skull and star patches are available, but feel free to convo if you have a design in mind you would like to have made. It fits most heads quite comfortably. I have a huge skull and it fits me pretty good. Friends with tiny heads report that they fit pretty nicely as well. It comes in one size, the awesome size. Made for discerning adventurers and outlaw freaks of all varieties.
Basically, this cap will make you an instant badass.*
*(It could even make a steampunk look tough)
http://www.etsy.com/listing/76258364/handmade-leather-bomber-cap
Lately, I’ve been learning how to use a sewing machine. This is the first thing I made from a pattern that I built from an old WWII bomber cap I had laying around. It’s all leather, with a cotton liner that has a striped pattern. Custom patches sewn on the sides. I learned how to sew a week ago and I don’t feel like stopping anytime soon. Thanks to Dusty Paik for teaching me everything I needed to know to get me going. Check out her Etsy shop here. Do it now. I’ll have a post on my Etsy shop about this cap in case anyone would like one.
Immolation is the act of setting yourself on fire.
Typically performed as an act of protest or resistance. The sacrificial act of Thích Quảng Đức stands out in the collective cultural memory not only as a provocative image but as a reminder of the distance individuals will go to make a point. When Thích Quảng Đức burned himself in Saigon, it was famously captured by AP photographer Malcolm Browne, who won a Pulitzer Prize for the image.
We live in turbulent times, rife with protest, violence and confusion. The purpose of this piece is to illustrate how acts of protest and resistance can be quickly changed into a commodity and neutered by American throw-away culture. Acts of extreme passion and resistance malformed by consumerism and mass media.
This burnable sculpture is made from reclaimed mahogany chips and a special non-toxic wax mixture. It stands at 6 inches and weighs around 1 pound.
If you choose to burn this art piece please note: It burns clean for about 45 minutes and smells quite pleasant. It does leave a slight waxy residue on whatever you burn it on. Please use caution when using this piece to start those important fires. Kids, ask mom and dad for permission before you burn the whole goddamn house down while using matches unsupervised.
There are 40 signed and numbered pieces in this limited run.
Modern fears and the cinema of doom.
By Jason Fitzgerald
2011
Every culture has some form of a world-ending scenario in their myths. To some, it is a literal battle between good & evil, as outlined in the Christian bible’s Book of Revelation, or the Nordic Ragnarok myths. The fear of a world-ending event still exists today, but because of the rapid advance of technology, the end of the world may be more of our own doing, rather than by a “battle royale” of the gods. In our modern era, movies are a dominant method for sharing the new myths, and pop culture cinema has invented a wide variety of ways for our world to go out swinging. By exploring some of the themes and subjects of doomsday cinema, we can identify elements that make it an enduring genre.
I will examine the public’s fascination with doomsday cinema and how manages it stay relevant to each new generation, and what the relation of dominant cultural tensions and fears are to the content of the doomsday film. J.P Telotte notes the genre’s importance as “…a revealing barometer of the era’s troubled political climate.”(96)
From the atom bomb and UFO scare flicks of the 1950’s to the barren zombie riddled wastelands of today’s movies, apocalyptic cinema has been a significant film genre since the 50’s, and continues to capture the imagination of the movie going public. The apocalyptic films of the 20thcentury are rife with parable and warning, with each film showcasing the madness and horror of the times. In particular, the medium of film has given us a stage to set up every kind of horrifying vision of the demise of humanity as we know it. Atomic war, nuclear war, viral infection, and killer asteroids could wipe us out in one stroke. Alien invasion, sapient technology, peak-oil, and societal collapse lurks on the darkest horizon, while zombies, climate change and the occasional dose of the fire and brimstone climax of the Christian bible fade in and out of view. .
In the 1950’s, America had its fears presented in vivid technicolor; particularly, the color red. After winning the war against the Nazis, Americans were left with a new enemy at the gates, that being communism. The red scare carried with it an atomic terror that could hardly be quantified without the war stopping double whammy the Americans gave Japan with two A-bombs named Fat Man and Little Boy. The blinding flash, the destruction and the atomic fallout stood out in that era as the definition of what was wrong and terrifying in the world. Hollywood was more than happy to capitalize on these fears with what could be called “Atomic Cinema”.
Most films stood as exploitative tales without regard for scientific fact. Square chinned All-American-Joe archetypical heroes duked it out with giant mutant ants, resurrected dinosaurs and other horrors that spawned from atomic testing or its byproduct waste. Countless “atomic” movies were made during the fifties. Most films, such as Them! (1954) and Beast from 20,000 fathoms (1953), dealt with monsters created through the unchecked testing of atomic weapons. In these films, as Kim Newman notes “the bomb and its side-effects became central to monster movies” (82). The atom was making Hollywood millions and it continued to churn out a near endless stream of B-movies that held the atom at its main inspiration. As the genre progressed, other films were made with more post-apocalyptic themes serving as a warning that our unchecked technological progress and warfare would bring cataclysmic consequences. Regarding this point, J.P. Telotte notes “…the various mutant and monster films of the 1950’s and 1960’s amply attest to the troubled attitudes toward science and technology in our culture.” (98-99)
Roger Corman, B-movie producer and director extraordinaire, creator of “atomic” classics such as Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957) and Day the World Ended (1955) is quoted as saying “I’m very much interested in the concept of nuclear holocaust…Personally, I don’t think it’s going to occur, but I think that through film, we should keep cautioning and warning people that it might”(104). In Corman’s, Day the World Ended, we are shown a world that has been decimated by atomic warfare and how its survivors struggle to live in this dangerous new landscape. The shattered cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima still resonated in the public’s imagination, as did the film reels of the atomic tests of the late 1940’s and early 1950’s. The world of post-atomic warfare as it was depicted in “atomic cinema”, seemed plausible and depending on what film you had just watched, inevitable. The horrors of the wasteland were at our doorstep, but the threat of communism extended its reach further into the public consciousness as well. This cold war fascination and fear continued to gain relevance in film and eventually moved from the b-movie drive-ins to the more serious realms of cinema.
In 1964, Director Stanley Kubrick introduced us to Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Often categorized as a black comedy, Dr. Strangelove takes satirical stabs at cold war paranoia and the rampant nuclear militarization of the U.S. and its adversary, the Soviet Union. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times called Dr. Strangelove “the cleverest and most incisive satiric thrusts at the awkwardness and folly of the military that has ever been on the screen.”
Dr. Strangelove could be categorized as an intellectual horror film. Instead of atomic monsters, we have actual nuclear weapons, and the unsteady hands of the men who control them.
At the films climax, Major T. J. King Kong (a B-52 bomber captain played by Slim Pickens) rides his nuclear bomb like a rodeo bull, dropping from the bomb bay door hatch to detonate somewhere over Russia. It is explained in the film that when the Soviet retaliation commences, all life on earth will be extinguished within 10 months. To illustrate how destructive this nuclear exchange could be, before the film’s credits roll, a quick montage of nuclear explosions is shown while the song “We’ll Meet Again” by Vera Lynn plays. The use of real nuclear bomb detonation footage shows viewers what this mutually assured destruction could look like. Despite the satirical nature of the film, the detonations depicted reinforce the possibility of such an apocalyptic event occurring.
“Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!” Charlton Heston uttered this famous line in Planet of the Apes (1968). Planet of the Apes is widely regarded as one of the best science fiction films ever made. In the 1960’s and 1970’s good ol’ Chuck Heston (or Cheston as I like to call him) made three films, a sort of ‘actors trilogy’ that operated with the post-apocalyptic and dystopian visions of the future. In Planet of the apes, “Cheston” plays an astronaut lost on a future earth ravaged by nuclear war that is inhabited by a civilization of intelligent apes. The nuclear fears of the cold war once again realized in full technicolor.
The second film in Charlton Heston’s sci-fi trilogy was the Omega Man (1971) He portrays an army doctor who is the sole unaffected survivor of a global plague caused by bacteriological warfare fought between the Communist nations of The Peoples Republic of China, and the U.S.S.R. The cold war, and its possible outcome, again, at the forefront of the worlds collective nightmares. Instead of battling hyper-evolved apes, Charlton fights off members of the savagely luddite “Family”, a group of infected survivors that have become nocturnal, albino, and have a violent distaste for the relics of the old culture that brought this doomsday apocalypse to the world. Cheston’s character. Colonel Robert Neville M.D. scavenges during the day to avoid the murderous and ghoulish members of the “Family”. The “Family” act as a monstrous reference to the counter-culture hippie movement and the 1969 Tate/La Bianca murders committed by the Manson Family.
1973 brought us Soylent Green (1973), based on 1966 science fiction novel Make Room! Make Room!, by Harry Harrison. Soylent deals with a new threat to humanity; overpopulation and world hunger. When his character stumbles upon the government’s cannibalistic solution to feeding the poor masses, Heston again gets to shout another iconic line, “Soylent Green is PEOPLE!” The ever evolving fears of the public have become faceted and numerous.
Doomsday began to take on more varied forms, in 1968, the same year that Planet of the Apes was released, Night of the Living Dead (1968) gnawed its way into theaters, introducing us to swarming armies of the undead. Zombies became another symbol in genre film that was used in reference to communism, atomic mishap, rampant consumerism, class-war and religious intolerance. Zombies served as a potent reminder that the “enemy” wasn’t always the Russians, the hippies, or the nukes. The zombie appeal to the movie going public peaked slightly in the 1970’s and early 80’s with films such as Return of the Living Dead (1985) and Dawn of the Dead (1978). Certain zombie films produced in the 1980’s and even today, deal heavily with scenarios of world wide zombification and empty wastelands of post-human dead zones where survivors scavenge for resources. An interesting parallel is the AIDS epidemic and its relation to the zombie genre. The idea of biblical Armageddon, nuclear war, communism and social unrest gave way to the simple virus. AIDS, and the idea of an indiscriminate infection, spread into the public consciousness and served as the basis of many apocalyptic film.
The idea of global infection came full-circle when it left the zombified remnants of humanity behind and concentrated on the cold hard realities of global viral pandemic. Films like Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys (1995), shows us an empty post-human world where nature has taken control of the environment and a deadly virus has driven humankind underground. In 12 Monkeys, we are shown a vision of the near dystopian future in immaculate detail. A man, alone in this new empty wild, played evenly by Bruce Willis, sets forth collecting clues about the global infection as he is hurtled though time by his prison guard task masters. The film incorporates many shots of a quietly doomed and empty Philadelphia winter as Bruce Willis wanders in search of evidence useful in his viral investigation. These images of man alone in the wasteland invokes perhaps a romantic throwback to the Genesis myths of the christian bible, and classical stories like Robinson Crusoe. The wasteland, the corrupted earth left in ruins from mankind’s wars and greed acts as an effective backdrop for modern cautionary tales like 12 Monkeys and many other post-apocalyptic tales.
The extreme cinematic vision of the apocalypse presented in the Mad Max film series is perhaps the most interesting and effective amalgam of the various social fears that popular culture has exploited. It certainly stands out as a singular set of films with wide ranging appeal and sets a stylistic standard for on-screen depictions of a post-apocalyptic wasteland. In the film The Road Warrior (1981) we are shown a blasted and desolate wasteland. After a global economic collapse, a peak-oil energy crisis and another World War, the outback of Australia is an arena for motorized mohawked marauders and other crazed survivors to wander picking at the bones of a dead civilization. Gas, or “guzzoline” is the only commodity of significant value. In this wasteland, human life is cheap and is evidenced by brutal murders, rapes and tortures enacted by roving barbaric gangs. These gangs terrorize a band of survivors running a petrol refinery out in the remote wastes. The fuel crisis of the 1970’s, punk rock, and the ever present fear of the nuke play out in a fury of near operatic mechanized mayhem. The themes and visual elements showcased in the Mad Max series are often copied and poorly re-imagined in other films. Very few of the copycat films address the seriousness and blasted desolation depicted in the Mad Max films. Usually the main failing is the re-appropriation of the imagery and costumes instead of the main themes of societal collapse, redemption and reluctant heroism. In every film of the series, our reluctant hero Max is left alone in the wastes to once again wander after fighting for the survival of others who need his help, each time moving further from the “dying world of roads”(261), and deeper into the empty wastes.
As the doomsday narrative evolved from atomic ants and crazed mutant zombies to stories with more realistic settings and situations where the suspension of belief is not as severe, we see seemingly common individuals thrust into extreme situations. Audiences became more savvy with the development of subject matter. We know that radiation does not make ants mutate into huge monsters. We understand the effects of viral outbreaks, resource wars and energy shortages. With the cold war over, and nuclear disarmament in effect across the globe, we lack the same bogey men to populate our post-apocalyptic world with. Today, the specter of terrorism can invoke some fears in the public but it is widely accepted that there isn’t a way for jihadist sects to wipe out the planet. So, we have drawn our gaze to the Earth itself. Climate change, widespread natural disasters and unknown cataclysm have replaced our nukes and mutants. Films such as 2012 (2009) and The Day After Tomorrow (2004) deal with a violent global event that destroys the world of man completely. The narratives typically focus on a small group of everyday people who survive and how they continue to let the fires of humanity burn bright like a beacon to offer a glimmer of hope for the future.
In possibly the finest example of post-apocalyptic film since The Road Warrior, we see the light of humanity nearly snuffed out in director John Hillcoat’s bleak film version of The Road (2009). Based on Pulitzer prize wining American author Cormac McCarthy’s novel of the same name, we are given no concrete explanation why civilization had abruptly ended and the world lies dead with drifting flurries of ash strewn about. We are only given a brief glimpse in a flashback scene where a blinding flash occurs and the viewer is left to draw their own conclusions. We are informed in dialog and flashbacks that society collapses quickly and humans are nearly extinct save for roving bands of cannibals and raiders. Our two main characters, only known as Man and Boy wander the shattered road making their way to the coast, with their belongings tightly packed in a shopping cart. They exist as drained starving skeletons, fearful of the other humans who may cross their path. Their road is a broken strip of fear and near starvation. “But that road is also a metaphor for the blind instinct to survive.”(1) states NPR’s David Edelstein in his review of the film. The Man and his son have a single purpose, and that is to survive, to “carry the fire” of humanity so that the world of man can live again.
Our myths have always been tales that incorporate a lesson or social value to iterate an ethic to the reader or in the case of film, the viewer. Our doomsday films have been no different. The films of the apocalypse serve as both entertainment and ham-fisted warning. Don’t get crazy with your toys kids, you might kill us all. Atom bombs, nuclear weapons, biological warfare, oil wars, overpopulation, viral pandemic, all of these act as potential world killers if we let them. The British film academics, Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska note that “Nightmarish science fiction film might also be a way for us to confront some of our fears about developments in science and technology.”(17) Hopefully we can, as a human race maintain our control and keep any of our doomsday fantasies from coming true. The world of fiction is often more forgiving than the hard realities that might exist in the true wasteland.
Sources
(96) (98-99)
Telotte, J.P. Science Fiction Film. Cambridge University Press, 2001
(82)
Newman, Kim. Apocalypse Movies. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2000.
(104)
Newman, Kim. Apocalypse Movies. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2000.
Bosley Crowther. Published: January 31, 1964
http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=EE05E7DF173DE367BC4950DFB766838F679EDE
(261)
Falconer, Delia. The Road Movie Book. Ed.Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark.
London & New York: Routledge.1997.
(1)
Edelstein, David. “At the end of the world, another road to trudge.” NPR.org. 25 Nov.2009
NPR.. 18 Nov 2010
Http:npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120612276
(17)
King, Geoff. Krzywinska, Tanya. Science Fiction Cinema: from outerspace to cyberspace.
London & New York, Wallflower, 2000.
List of related film material.
Them! (1954)
Beast from 20,000 fathoms (1953)
Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957)
Day the World Ended (1955)
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
Planet of the Apes (1968)
Omega Man (1971)
Soylent Green (1973)
Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Return of the Living Dead (1985)
Dawn of the Dead (1978)
12 Monkeys (1995)
The Road Warrior (1981)
2012 (2009)
The Day After Tomorrow (2004)
The Road (2009)
Not really related to art directly. But amazing anyway. A swarm of honey bees have descended into the fortress. Pretty neat. I wonder what brought them here.
