the New Assthetic
the thought dump.fm
SFAA film now online?
Shoplifting Poems From American Apparel
I first ran across the book Shoplifting From American Apparel in a bookstore ca. 2010. The title and cover design caught my eye and I wrote it down in my phone, which looked like this. That was the first I heard of Tao Lin. I did not buy the book, because I was (and still am) a college student with no money. I did not shoplift the book. I did not read the book until ~2 years later. I probably did not go into an American Apparel store until ~2 years later, either. I have never bought or shoplifted anything from American Apparel. I have an iPhone now.
In 2012, Shoplifting From American Apparel was made into a movie, directed by Pirooz Kalayeh and starring Brad Warner, Jordan Castro, Noah Cicero, and Bebe Zeva. It is “part absurdist documentary and part cinematic realism.” The IMDB page that I hyperlinked spells it “absurdest,” which makes me laugh, as if this was the most absurd documentary of any documentary. I don’t know. Maybe it is. I haven’t seen the movie.
It is 2013 now and I’m trying to forget a lot of things. If you go to the website for the Shoplifting From American Apparel movie, you are presented with a finite number of options. If you click the “Shoplift” button, you can watch a director’s cut, or download the movie, or download the director’s cut. I noticed that the download links go to YouSendIt pages. I used to use that website to send music to friends, in like, 8th grade. That year I was probably sending Green Day, NOFX, a lot of pop punk and punk music.
Another button you can click is Remix. The first line on the page reads, “You are watching a video about a movie. The video makes you feel that you can remix the movie.” There is also an embedded video in which Pirooz Kalayeh and Brad Warner encourage you to remix scenes from the movie, upload your remix, and post a link to the movie’s Facebook page, so that they can then post the link on their site.
They also tell you that you can type poems right into the website, in that yellow-on-black retro videogame-esque text, to be screenshotted, posted on the Facebook page, and judged by the formidable gang of Jordan Castro, Noah Cicero, Heiko Julien, Matt Sherling, and Beach Sloth. The top 5 poems will be read at the Spreecast website launch party on May 19th.
I spent ~2 minutes looking through the folder of my own poems to try this out. I think the idea is that you remix the material from the movie, but I would say I’m not really in a position to do that right now. I decided a poem called “the great decline” seemed most fitting in terms of the aesthetic of Shoplifting From American Apparel, or at least the book, anyways. This was a collaborative and flarfed poem with Banango co-editor Justin Carter, probably written partially on the phone hyperlinked in the first paragraph. That poem is the third photo in this post.
I encourage you to watch the movie and write poems on the site and share them on the Facebook page. This is a nifty cross-media…type…thing. The book begat the movie begat poems. Something here about everything decaying into poetry. What will the poems, in turn, generate?
“Urban Talisman”
Each cigarette was individually emptied and refilled with soil and forget-me-not seeds.
Anna C Bodell
2013
(via michaaaaelr)
Internet as Religion
This series is a collection of altar pieces portraying Internet and social media culture as a form of religion. I have been really interested in the way we treat our technology like sacred objects, so I wanted to blend our love and acceptance of these things and show them in the way in which the love and passion towards religions are shown. I’ve noticed many parallels between technology and religion and thought it interesting to explore these intersecting points. Internet as Religion is an ongoing series and I’m extremely excited to see how it evolves over time.LOVE THIS.
i’m still like melting over the exposure this has gotten in the last few days. i’ve been pouring all of my heart and thoughts into this project and it means so much to me that it’s being received well.
also, huge thanks to miles for reblogging it to his followers. this exposure wouldn’t have been possible for me without you, boo
(via sadlymasturbating)
James Franco contemplating Jeffrey Deitch on the eve of his favorite holiday, 2013
Installation View
OK Soda was a soft drink created by The Coca-Cola Company in 1993 that aggressively courted the Generation X demographic with unusual advertising tactics.It did not sell well in select test markets and was officially declared out of production in 1995 before reaching nation-wide distribution. The drink’s slogan was “Things are going to be OK.” Spokespeople for the company and their advertisers were very frank about the fact that they were marketing the drink entirely on the “feeling” rather than the taste.
Both the cans and the print advertisements for the soft drink featured work by popular “alternative” cartoonists Daniel Clowes and Charles Burns. Unlike the brightly colored Coca-Cola cans, they were decorated in drab shades of gray, with occasional red text. In addition to the primarily two-tone illustrations, the cans would feature a special code that could be entered at the given 800 number as well as a “Coincidence”, which was usually some odd bit of trivia about some town in the United States. They would also sometimes contain messages from the OK Manifesto, which was a series of platitudes about OK-Ness, pithy thought reform sayings with no real meaning, doublespeak, mocking traditional advertisement slogans or catch-phrases. Some cans had similar messages printed on their inside..
its like radiohead: the beverage
(Source: teen-grrl, via acklesobrien)
