Chugging Past Collectivist Consumerism

One of the weirdest pitfalls of consumerism is collectivism. Nearly everyone I know who owns a house has a room for junk filling. In some cases, an extra room just for storage is a huge plus when shopping for a new home. Those that aren't so lucky rent one of those dozens of Armored Storage cells, surrounded by barbed wire and guarded 24-7 by rent-a-cops and surveillance cameras.

Laptops and iPods: MC Chris and Math the Band

I saw Math the Band and mc chris this past weekend at Tempe's Clubhouse. I didn't know who either of them were a half-hour before the show, but I had an extraordinarily good time. I took videos too, which came out sucky, but I decided to upload them anyway because I have a weird hobby of saturating YouToob with crap.

Andy Warhol Eats a Hamburger

So. . .
You just watched Andy Warhol eat a hamburger. Maybe you're wondering what it's all about. It seems simple enough, just Andy in a green room munching his lunch, but he's famous. Maybe in this case, he does something interesting.
So you watch as he opens the bag, pulls out the burger and unwraps it. No fries. The burger could be from anywhere.
He dabs ketchup on the side and dips the burger into the ketchup instead of laying it on top, even though he pulled off the top bun. What?
Now you're curious, is he gonna do anything more? So for the next three minutes as he chews and chews, you're mind is racing. You're wondering, what the hell is Andy Warhol thinking? He stares off into the middle-distance, chomp-chomping away and he doesn't look bored or happy or sad or even hungry. He is the epitome of emotionlessness.
Suspense builds in your head like a pot boiling over. You're still trying to figure this out. He pulls the hamburger apart and doesn't even finish it! What the hell? He wraps the mess back up and stows it back in the sack, sets it aside, then twiddles his thumbs. He looks lost, glancing around, nearly paranoid, and his mouth is half open, like he's gonna say something.
Now the suspense is killing you! Is he gonna explain this all away? Is he? He opens his mouth . . . and closes it. . . and opens it again! He does this for nearly a minute!
And it's the longest minute of your life. Longer than that moment you almost drowned. Longer than that moment you were fired for stealing from your job. Longer than the minute you first inhaled.

Suddenly! It zooms in on Andy's face and he says,

"Um, my name is Andy Warhol and uh, I just finished eating a uh, hamburger."

That's it.
That's it. It's perfect.
It bars no explanation. It needs none. But for those of you confused, or unsatisfied, think of it this way:
It's either the greatest joke ever told or a masterpiece of the simplest things in life. Perhaps it's something sexual.
But I think Andy is mocking his own celebrity status. Of all the artists in history, Andy Warhol is probably the only artist more well-known than his art. And his art is simple, commonplace objects turned upside down. By videotaping an act so simple that no one values, Andy is saying, why does anyone value me?
It's the most self-loathing, despairing video I have probably ever seen. And I hope you understand it like I do, because it truly is great.

Debbie Family History - A Nostalgic Requiem

debbie family history from Kyle Anderson on Vimeo.

Squared and I were lost and strayed into random back alleys until we came upon a pile of discarded VHS tapes and old SNES games. We took as many as we could carry, found our way home and later in the year, would drink and watch whatever we popped in.

One video, "Debbie Family History" was especially intriguing but only when the gears started turning did we realize what we discovered.

8mm home videos, mutely filmed decades ago, memories transferred from negatives to positive to VHS to digital, dissolved a hundred times over until the spaces where the light hit the film barely remains.

This lone tape, now sitting on a bookshelf in my room, is possibly the only remnant of these things that happened.

So we had the brilliant idea of melding the six-hour video together with music and some of my words. We tried to keep the nostalgia as intact as possible.

The writing was inspired by an even older VHS tape I once watched as a kid. The BFG, a cartoon adaption of the Roald Dahl classic that terrified me but left poignant imagery in my head for years.
The story goes, a giant lives in a cave in the sky and captures floating dream things in jars and releases them into little kids minds. I took that concept and reversed it, an unknown being that takes memories and dreams that are no longer being used. As discarded as the cassette we found.

Sick and Wrong Children's Shows

For my men and masculinity class, I was told to watch children's television and analyze the amount of men and women portrayed in the show. Total crap, right?
Since I don't own a television, I had to turn to the magick of Youtube. These are some of the weird videos I found on the site by typing in "Children's Shows".

I'm not letting my kids watch television when they are born.