Humor

Visit a ghetto for the gifted in this Christmas tape that features painting, cooking, and a private tour of cubicles dedicated to culture. Revel in the un-whiteness of a Los Angeles holiday and bask in the heat of noshing newlyweds. Happy New Year!

Something primitive projects into the present to upset the lives of a group of people delving into past-life regression techniques. The hairy intrusion is both attractive and repellent as he strips bare a suburban carcass composed of Christian pretensions and pagan proclivities.

A tour of acting gigs that come my way and the people behind the cameras that aim at my expanding torso. A bloated ham in action on the West Coast and the thespians that rub shoulders with his hind quarters. Shot in San Francisco and Hollywood, USA.

The expansive cycles of time vs. the ever smaller circles of life under lockdown. Includes: a journey to the river, some rat facts, more adverts, anagrams, and a noticeable build up of ideas.

Third video in The Variations cycle.

A glittering, Las Vegas-inspired music video for John Sex’s song "Bump and Grind It".  With an outrageous fountain hairdo (by stylist Danilo), Sex sings his catchy pop lyrics, “You gotta put your love behind it/Bump, bump, bump and grind it.”  Featuring the Bodacious Ta-Tas and inter-cut with Vegas showgirl footage.

This title is also available on Tom Rubnitz Videoworks: Sexy, Wiggy, Desserty.

At the 'Institute for Metaphysical Research and Spiritual Wellness', crackpots, perverts and guitar strumming UFO abductees struggle with the supernatural and their own carnal needs.

-- Mike Kuchar

Combining Rubnitz’s skillful manipulation of the familiar “look” of TV shows with an extraordinary range of characters, performer Ann Magnuson convincingly impersonates the array of female types seen on TV in a typical broadcast day. From glitzy to drab, from friendly housewife to desperate evangelist, Magnuson is a one-woman universe appearing on every channel, the star of every program—giving her all as the chameleon woman who is always on display.

The genius and mystique of Edward D. Wood, filmmaker, actor, and author, permeates this excursion into the exposed underbelly of cookie-contaminated corruption and moral bankruptcy. Come along for the ride and experience the black and white world of bagged confectionary and bruised libidos as the 1940s meets the 1990s in a head-on collision of balding Bozos and blubbery bimbos. Fasten your girdles and seatbelts for the gut-expanding excursion to excitement.

Once again a seaside serenade of sloshing oils and simmering scallops fills the crannies of Cape Cod with dingle-berries of dubious delight!  Join a crew of crustacean craving civilians as they shuck their shells of inhibitions to become the truly truculent trespassers of a salty sanctuary.  Visit the chefs of chivalry as they skewer the squeamish with talons of titillating tidbits, each one a calorie crunching course in obese obtrusiveness and opulent oddness.  Come one, come all, and sample a smorgasbord of simple pleasures in this vacation video of vicarious vacillations.

Shutters click in this clothes-dropping exhibition of photographic exposures sure to quicken the pulse of those in need of extremity expansion. The voice of artistic reason rises above orgiastic visuals that splash across the pages of glue-bound volumes oozing with sticky subjects of a carnal persuasion. Come and rejoice in the mayhem and frivolity that only Eros unchained can deliver. The soiled and the damned live again on the glossy pages of glue-bound tabloids ticketed for hell and beyond.

On April 6th, 1974, this episode of the Videofreex’s production of Lanesville TV aired, including four segments: a choreographed piece by the Elaine Summers Dancers, a Vietnam tape titled “Where do you get your money?,” several phone conversations with local audience members, and a comical interview with a fictional fish, Sam Trouta.

Identically dressed, and with sibling-like resemblance, performance artists Trevor Martin and Kym Olsen shift between spoken word and athletic dance choreography in a collection of 29 scenes. Set in various locations--including a gymnasium, an abandoned hospital, and a trailer park circus--Martin and Olsen slip between a ventriloquist and his dummy, a seducer and his surrogate, a doctor and his patient, and synchronized dance partners. The film examines a complex social psychology--questioning the colonization of the human body for various political, medical and religious agendas.

"Combining the comical with the absurd, I created six funny faces to animate the images of Japanese vowels while differentiating between 'image', 'letter', and 'voice'."

— Takahiko iimura

"iimura deconstructs our coherence as he shifts between the English roman alphabet and Japanese characters, interjects spoken Japanese, and manipulates the computer images of his features.  The images often take on geometrical shapes, others recall the classical images from Japanese woodcuts of Samurai warrior grimace."

— Robert West, Curator, Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, NC

In New Report, Wynne Greenwood and K8 Hardy are reporters at WKRH - the feminist news station that is "pregnant with information." As Henry Irigaray (Hardy) and Henry Stein-Acker-Hill (Greenwood), these two lesbian feminist artists stage reports on and with their friends, their social herstories, their nerves, and their bodies. It is urgently broadcast live to the newsroom and out to their studio audience.

Putting the Balls Away is a reenactment of the historic September 21, 1973, tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs, created for broadcast on the 35th anniversary of the original event. The Battle of the Sexes was the most-watched live sporting event at that time, and pitted chauvinist against feminist, when women tennis players demanded equal pay to that of their male counterparts. Both players are performed by Mateik, whose work wages strategic operations to overthrow institutions of compulsory gender. After each game the competitors "switch sides".

Surrounded by the scribblings of the undecipherable, the denizens of the dark and the cheap reach out for light and for the pearls of wisdom that lie enmeshed in a maze of grooved and spray-painted enigmas. A trip through New Age horizons and the madness just around the corner and above our heads. Come with an open mind and sit with a sealed orifice.

A leisurely meditation on East West interactions involving accidental Occidental mishaps and Oriental dental ingenuity. Throw in some parakeets and a squeamish socialite, mix with a dash of depression and then stir thoroughly with a dollop of docudrama. Voila: a gum-flapping snack of lip smacking goo with scented whiffs of wisdom to sniff!

A bird of paradise is pruned for the lens of a Bolex camera as my Sony camcorder documents the film and video scene out here in fog-bound Frisco. A look behind the haze that blocks from view new and old faces as they frame within the medium of choice the tidbits we eventually devour with our eyes.

A Day for Cake and Accidents features a cast of animal characters — each of a different, though often indeterminate, species — who struggle with impending astrological despair and engage in absurdist dialogs, confessing various melancholic desires and transgressive secrets in poetic cartoon abjection.

A Day for Cake and Accidents is the third in a series of short collaborative animations.

This sprawling drama about a group of country folk sucked into the fashion world of magazine layouts and romantic intrigue features a cast of glamorously garbed gals and good-natured bumpkins. Produced in collaboration with his students at the San Francisco Art Institute, the picture delivers high-octane antics fueled by the $800 budget and creative desperation typically inherent in these types of endeavors. The cast is large and labors valiantly with the high speed shooting schedule and color saturated subplots.

A combination birthday/going away party proceeds at its own shallow pace, while revellers reminisce inwardly amid a paralyzing atmosphere of mixed drinks and emotions that choke all but the young at heart and body.

In Joan Does Dynasty — a hilarious classic of feminist media deconstruction — critic Braderman literally projects herself onto the set of the favorite series of one hundred million people in 78 countries. Her do-it-yourself deconstruction of TV’s most successful night-time soap opera is at once a succinct critical analysis of the disturbing cultural assumptions inherent in the narrative, and an unabashed appreciation of the show’s seductive power.

Alone in my room at the El Reno Inn, way out west from Oklahoma City, I face a big picture window that overlooks the refuse of Route 66 to ponder the fate of trailer trash in Twisterville. The skies darken and rumble to the sounds of Mother Nature in heat while Big Brother TV suffers an anxiety attack. Lightning flares up while rain pounds down on the terminal tourists of a raging planet. Only the ice-cold veneer of a sculpted ceramic gives comfort to the terrorized tenant who sweats in sequestered silence while the sky falls down.

It was 1990 and, although the iron curtain was falling, Soviet official control was still iron-fisted.  Camcorder reporter Skip Blumberg went along with a group of art aficionados on a tour of the Moscow studios of the unofficial artists, an underground community of talented, courageous and often wacky conceptual artists.  His report reveals an insider’s view of the art world and, at the same time, is a video about making a video.

In the second part of the Classics Exposed series, a neurotic scholar (Gibbons) leads a "buggy" ride tour through historic Charleston where, according to the professor, Franz Kafka wrote The Metamorphosis after taking a wrong turn on his way to Hollywood. Live-action with six-legged animation.

This title is also available on Emily Breer: Classics Exposed.