HAPPY vs. SAD

HAPPY VS. SAD from Karen B. Song on Vimeo.

You thought the ULTIMATE battle was between GOOD versus EVIL. Well NOW, you can witness the EPIC battle between HAPPY versus SAD. Sometimes disguised as HI versus LO. Or LOVE versus HATE. Or FUN versus YUCK. Be forewarned though, it can get pretty ugly (or ugly pretty, depending on your point of view). Can our girl find freedom from its destructive path?

Film I wrote, shot, edited, did music for in 72 hours for the 2009 AAFL 72-hour film shootout. Entry from Team Singasong. Starring Karina Michaels, Roi King and Catherine Song.

Ryan McGinness' Fishing Party

Last night I had one of those old skool New York nights, random and kewl. On my way home from an event, I noticed a bunch of objects floating and bouncing before me (I wasn't on drugs or drink, only Malaysian roti). On closer look I saw that they were tied to an end of a string. I looked far up to the top of the building to find a buncha folk with fishing rods. Of course, there was a guy sitting in a chair on the street. I asked what's going on? Then a folded up piece of paper fell in front of my face. I think that's for you, dude in chair said. So I take it off the hook. Alana wants to give you a warm hug. Well, um, ok. I ask dude, is Alana cute? He didn't know Alana. So I walk my way up I think 8 flights of stairs in this loft building. I get to the top floor and there are a bunch of smelly real fish hanging off hook & wire from the ceiling. Gone Fishing, was scrawled at the end of the hall. I made my way into the loft space, and was promptly tagged and led to the fish tank (an area blocked off by wall size plastic wrap) by the person who's line I took. Yes, I was the fish that was caught. And our fisherman came in often to check on us, make sure we had everything we needed to keep us happy in the tank.

I discovered that it was contemporary superstar artist Ryan McGinness' loft. He had proposed to do 50 parties in one year, every Friday, with a different theme. A custom-made-black-card carrying members only party. Last week was paintball. Last night's was fishing. The theme was delightfully thorough. He was dressed in overalls and a big messy straw hat, as were his friends. There was a bowl of fish. Snacks included swedish fish, goldfish crackers, fish sticks, breaded nuggets in fish shapes. At midnight, fish-shaped trophies were given to winning fishers in different categories. Most caught. Heaviest catch. Tallest catch. etc. Fish in the tank were given hefty tequila shots and told to drink like a fish. Since I just had surgery, I was granted leniency. Then there was the live fish eating competition. Middle-weight older dude swallowed his whole. Younger foreign hipster, chomped on his. They both went to ten. Chomp chomp chomp. DISGUSTING!!!!!! That part of the evening was unbearable. Other than that, it was a fun night. Met some cool folks. And went home with one of those red fortune telling fish! THAT, I was really psyched about.

An Ode to Character Actors: Edward Everett Horton, Jay O. Saunders, Jackie Earle Haley

There are iconic actors whose names go down in history, and other actors who don't. I want to celebrate the ones that aren't household names, who've appeared in sometimes more films than any leading actor, in films with all those iconic names, sometimes unrecognizable from one work to the next, and whose contribution to arts and entertainment is immense. They are critical in defining the tone and genre, and the telling, of the stories they're in. Their work is always delicious. Especially in comedies, and equally bone-chilling in scary movies.

Lately I've been watching lots of classic black & white films with names like Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn and Clark Gable. And there's this guy you keep seeing, that's just so funny and delicious to watch. His name is Edward Everett Horton. You'd know him by face. And boy does he look familiar. Cause he's been in everything! Seeing him in a film makes "instant-happy."

Then seeing the brilliant and rip-roaringly funny (yeah, when done well, Shakespeare will have you bent over, holding your stomach) production of "Twelfth Night" in Central Park. I refer to him as "the drunk"... Jay O. Saunders. I could just watch only him through the entire show. I even followed his exit, studying his "drunkeness" waiting for it to crack. Nope, he was definitely drunk, through and through. Then reading the playbill when I got home, and discovering that he was "THE donkey" in the Park's horrible production of "Midsummer Night's Dream" 2 years back. He was the ONLY thing happening in that play, a performance I never forgot, and I studied him onstage too. I don't know what I hoped to find studying him, but I was completely mesmerized. I didn't realize that these two characters were the same actor! Today I discovered he was also the wife-envy neighbor in "Revolutionary Road." Again, didn't recognize him to be the same person as these other two.

And then there's Jackie Earle Haley. You couldn't convince me that he wasn't the person he portrayed in "Little Children," a tortured pedophile. Then to discover that he was the incredible actor who played Rorschach in the crap film "Watchmen"? He was so alive on that screen, so nuanced a performance, so real a person, I couldn't believe what I was seeing. He seemed so familiar. Then later discovered he was "the ped"! Mesmerizing.

I love these actors. Their presence, and their work. And especially character actors in older films during the studio system, where stock characters were a distinctive and colorful quality of the storytelling palate. It traces back to storytelling-entertainment roots in Commedia dell'arte, Shakespeare's theater, and vaudeville. Will write more later about stock characters and different forms of theater as extensions of folk storytelling and pagan ritual. Something I've been thinking about for years, while traveling, and studying pagan traditions, both, interconnected passions of mine.

Francis Bacon Retrospective; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC

Francis Bacon's paintings at his recent retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, are powerful visual manifestations of a dialogue with mortality, loss, alienation, time, sanity, and the brief nature and struggle of life, form and decay. The viewer's struggle to grasp elusive "form," yet experiencing something material left behind by a man who is dead and in the ground, is overwhelming. His forms are as elusive, and frustratingly so, as trying to grasp this illusion we call "Reality." One takes grand comfort in the solidarity, of someone being able to express this intangible quality of life, in so tangible a form as painting with Bacon affirming so poignantly, form as a mere suggestion, a whir of energy translated into color. Each painting, a poem. His color palate, even dissected from an idea of form, is beautiful and viscerally meaningful, in the same way de Kooning's colors hit me.

Bacon's forms are tortured, struggling for solidity, struggling to come into being. Melting away. A whisper away from cascading into darkness. Light and color being a brief manifestation, a gathering of dust particles, if even. Form as an "event" in the way a firework explodes into the sky for a briefly beautiful, exciting yet violent and quietly disappearing moment.

There's nothing to grasp or hold on to. Meat and carcass, the fragility of the body. And yet, these forms exist in their own confined space, a stage, a ring, a glass box, not physical, defined by just lines...self imposed? Sometimes there's a door in frame. Exit or entrance? Freedom or hell? Can it even open? Or is it just a picture? A tease of the cosmic joke variety. Conclusion, we are a perpetual and delicate balancing act between extremes. Being and not. Spatial materiality and energy. Flesh and spirit. Love and torture. Beast/deformed and human form. Order and disorder. Becoming and receding. Scream and silence. Authority and powerlessness. I and the Other. Insane and sublime... The triptychs confirm relativity, perpetual change in spatial/time relationship, non-authority of a single take. Time and event is constantly being dissected like a film reel, and form within that, constantly disintegrating.

The only thing, the exhibit, although quite extensive and filling, was missing a lot of his works. I thought it would be a more thorough collection. Also reminds me, I have to watch "Love is the Devil" again for the umpteeth time, one of my favorite films, directed by John Maybury. It focuses on Bacon's life with George Dyer, his lover and muse, who ultimately killed himself. Yes, tragic. He did it in their hotel room on the night of Bacon's opening at the Grand Palais in Paris. Bacon was the only other foreign artist next to Picasso to have been given that highest honor. If ever the opportunity to see "Devil" on the big screen, do so. The film is very painterly, with a story as intense as Bacon's paintings, as intense as his life.

Little Dragon's "Twice" Directed by Johannes Nyholm

This song sounds like falling in love in the summertime. Love the video. Beautifully poetic with Yukimi Nagano's ethereal voice carrying you, the timeless quality of the video's sepia color tone, and its simplicity (altho these puppets eye's blink) of the puppet imagery and backdrop. After seeing "The 39 Steps" on Broadway, an amazing show, using puppetry, prop ingenuity, and just amazing acting and imagination, I wanted to investigate puppetry. And here we have it again, so simple, beautiful...with an epic journey unfolding.

Listerine

"Bunny Mellon, the reclusive 98-year-old Listerine heiress"... pulled from yesterday's Sunday New York Times Style Section... sounds like something I made up in one of my absurdist short stories I was writing years back. Above is an ad JWT São Paulo did for them, which I find kinda sick and hilarious. While the NYT's quote, just surreal and hilarious: the words are funny; the image too. If you can't see the details of this ad, click the image, or to see more in its series, click here. It'll show a Catholic altar scene of a germ bride, and the emptiness around her with the tagline "KILLS 99% OF GERMS."

Walter Kronkite, R.I.P.

The passing of Walter Kronkite invariably reminds me of my father. Childhood memories of my dad in the 70's has him planted in front of the TV eating dinner watching the news, or not being home and driving his yellow cab around the mean streets of New York City. The City felt so dangerous back then. I remember always being relieved when my parents came home from work. My mom went out into the dark night for her shift at the hospital. My parents couldn't afford a babysitter for me so they watched me in shifts. She worked nights. He worked days. My fears were confirmed when once dad came home robbed and mildly knifed after a shift. Our 7-channel (if we were that lucky...channel reception depended on our jagged wire-hanger-bunny-eared antenna) black and white tv set, blared all the crimes of our graffiti-covered city. I used to sleep under blankets for fear of break-ins. We lived within a block of a busy elevated train track with the frequent train chuggs as our ambient soundtrack.

Life was so different back then. Despite having to sit in front of the tv set to hold the antenna in a certain spot or to turn the heavy channel dial, even tv was much simpler. I remember the ticking of CBS's "60 Minutes". I remember Walter Kronkite's mustache. He was a celebrity in our humble apartment--I think I was 4 or 5 years old. Years later, I remember when my father told me he had picked Mr. Kronkite up in his cab to take him to work one day. I asked him, did you say anything to him? I can't remember what my dad said. I think he said nothing, which would've been in character. Or maybe he couldn't resist and told Mr. Kronkite that he was once a journalist. What I do remember was that it was a memorable enough event for my dad, who doesn't communicate much, to have shared with me. Mr. Kronkite was a common fixture in our one-bedroom apartment in Queens, as common as those subway cars outside floating to and fro the city skyline, as common as my dad's yellow cab pulling up on our block at sunset, as common as that sunset spilling through Manhattan's skyline into our apartment with sherbert colors, past the smelly fish hanging in our kitchen window, that my dad put up to dry (amidst my mom's protestations), as common as the Twin Towers book-ending one side of the skyline, as common as the dreams my parents had of "making it" as struggling young immigrants to this country. With each celebrity passing, we also remember the lives we had that were intricately entwined with them.

Michael Jackson R.I.P.

So much has happened since even before my last entry, that I haven't been able to put my head around it all to blog so casually. First being the passing of Michael Jackson, and the ensuing global ubiquitous celebration of his life. A time marker of my generation. Finding images or songs to re-post here felt inadequate. I think his memorial service covered all ground, and I was able to mourn the tragedy of his life, and celebrate the almost mythical heights he accomplished and how much he shared, as an artist and humanitarian, in his life. If I could (embedding on youtube turned off), I would now post his "Beat It" video.

I was in 6th grade, immersed in the "Flashdance" soundtrack, and wanting to be one of the kids in the movie "Fame," recording songs with my tape recorder in front of my transistor radio of Casey Casem's Top 40 Countdown, and staying up all hours of the night to catch music videos on tv's "Friday Night Videos". God forbid I went to a friend's house with cable tv...I want my MTV! No one had cable back then, so if we found it, we hogged it. Pre-internet days, we had to sit and wait, through commercials and other songs, by the radio, by the tv, until our cherished songs were played. It was the summer of Men at Work, Hall & Oates, the Police, Irene Cara, and of course, Michael Jackson. As far as pop-music was concerned, Cyndi Lauper, Madonna, Prince, Duran Duran, and break-dancing were still half a year away. We sat in front of the radio, and then that gong came on (OMG!!!!), then that beat came on, then the unmistakable whirring sound like the dropping of a bomb, then the guitar riff. Then the video...

I will never forget seeing "Beat It". Even watching it now, it is so amazing! The narrative is so well put, this impending battle just felt so dangerous! And that it ends in a dance peacemaking?!!! But not just any old kind, it was the precise MJ kind. Yes, his dance was just that big and dramatic enough to stop war! The precision of his moves, still keeps your eyes glued. I mean, in the pool hall, WHAT IS HE DOING?!!!! And the END SCENE?!!!!! When we first saw it, there was NOTHING like it, or him. He broke shapes and conventions. Knees and legs angled in the air, hips turning in 3 directions at once, head snap turns! We went berzerk! It still makes me a little crazy with giddiness watching it now. Oh how we imitated those dance moves...dealing those deck of cards out, so effortlessly. And that jacket! The introduction of that jacket! That also made us a little berzerk. Red leather with the metal net and studs, and just irregular. Silver socks?!!! And the endless changes in the music. The dramatic guitar riffs, the heavy breaths, the hiccups, the woohoo's, and eee'hee's! The whole experience was just overwhelming: on the radio, and then the big video debut on tv! (Yes, music video "debut's" were BIG events back then, at least for me). I wish I was a fly on the wall in that studio with him and Quincy Jones. To watch those artists at work at that time in pop music history.

How MJ sang and moved, there was nothing like it. Every time that song came on the radio, with the sound at the beginning of the gong!!!... I can remember the anticipation. And then again with THAT BASS LINE!!! for "Billie Jean". And I guess what we understand now, is that his music was so intricately married to visuals, imagery, movement, fashion. It all just helped to heighten and express the dramatics of the music. It was those early days of MJ's and music videos in general that planted my love for that genre that led me to a career in that field. There is so much more to say, but it's all been said. MJ's work stands on its own. Let us continue to celebrate the work of this artist who went to the farthest reaches. Rest in peace Michael.

Pina Bausch R.I.P.