(Via Light Industry)
Projective Life
Tuesday November 22, 7:30 pm at Light Industry: $8 at the door
Light Industry is billing next week’s screening event as a reading (“broadly defined”), which sounds interesting but also begs the question: lol what?
As you may or may not know, Light Industry is more or less a cinema and film discussion forum, but with Projective Life they’re opening up the floor to some good old-fashion poetry and prose, setting the stage for an interesting dialogue between the oral/literary and their usual video and projection modes and getting rid of the “sad exigencies of plot” altogether: “Under these conditions, a film can act as a reading and reading may become a kind of film.”
Artist Ken Okiishi (maybe you’ve seen his oil paintings on flatscreen/decaying VHS static loops at the Whitney) will screen his 1999 video work, Death and the College Student, shot in a dorm room where kids are watching films like Rebel Without a Cause and My Own Private Idaho in the background. There are “unwitting reenactments” of Larry Clark’s Kids, and a surprise appearance from Google Translate. Yeah, it’s weird. You get the idea.
(Film still, “Death and the College Student,” Ken Okiishi )
Writer Lucy Ives will share work that also dwells in the strange space between banal and abstract, by reading from her new book The Hermit. It proved everyone wrong about the listicle, which we’ve (mistakenly) assume is just another unfortunate product of modern, stupid life (see also: celebrity cats, wedding hashtags, President-Imminent Donald Trump). Billed as “a catalog of thoughts concerning art and experience […] fragments of dreams, lists, games, conversations, poems, and notebooks” published on actual, IRL a paper, Ives’s work shows that yeah, it’s possible for listy-like things to be cerebral.
Ok, so Ives’s book is also a great example of how writers, and artists in general, keep track of their shit. But the impulse to self-search, and attempting to define our world through literary sketches and bullet points, shouldn’t be written off along with “Top Ten Hottest Celebrities Who Are Also Compulsive Nose-Pickers.” For artists, tracking the creative process, jotting down ideas as they come, and organizing experience into as-yet-unraveled ideas, is often a compulsion. As Ives writes: “Impulse of some novelists: pessimism, fear, a hatred that finds no relief in reality.”
The Satan Killer
Saturday November 19 and Friday November 25, midnight at Spectacle: $5
Get ready for this weekend’s midnight special at Spectacle: from the VHS $1 bin straight to your heart, it’s The Satan Killer! Your gracious hosts have dubbed this 1993 B action-horror film a “mind-ruining crime flick,” following a hopped-up, devil-worshipping biker dude sporting literally the boxiest jawline you’ve ever laid eyes on, as he dodges a corrupt, scum-of-the-earth cop.
If you’ve ever wondered about the origins of Assy McGee (that so lovable, yet so flawed and flatulent crime fighter of Adult Swim yore), there might be some parallels in the boozehound detective leading the anti-Satanist crusade in this film, but you’re probably just thinking too hard.
Case in point: The Satan Killer was directed by Stephen Calamari and filmed entirely in beautiful, sunny Virginia Beach, so we’re guessing the only thing Mr. Italiano Fried Squid Man had on his mind was making himself look good as (probably) the film’s lead. And doing so as quickly as possible so he could hang up his directing shoes and hit the frozen daiquiri bars and scoop up some ladies before his afternoon skull-swelling inevitably hit and made him look like a bloated heirloom tomato in a too-tiny newsboy cap.
(Film still via PS1/Facebook)
Black Radical Imagination
Sunday November 20, 4 pm to 6 pm at MoMA PS1: $12
This week’s Sunday Sessions at PS1 will feature Black Radical Imagination, a “touring program of visual shorts that delve into the worlds of new media, video art, and experimental narrative.” With a focus on new work drawing on “new stories within the diaspora,” with a strong emphasis on Afrofuturism, each filmmaker and artist participating in the series presents “their own vision about post-modern society through the state of current black culture.” In other words, this one’s a must see.
For this round, the series will spotlight short films by four artists, Jamilah Sabur, Suné Woods, Vashti Harrison, and Ephraim Asili (see video above). Following this screenings, Black Radical Imagination curators Erin Christovale and Amir George will lead a Q+A with Asili.