Humor

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.

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.

Budlong Memorial Middle School is heating up. Queer Teen Romance is a charmingly perverse homage to the after-school special that tackles bullying in a hormone-fueled flurry of forbidden sexual fantasy. When Bryce, the school bully, picks on outcast Kevin, a group of tough (and brightly accessorized) girls decide to teach Bryce a lesson. But maybe Kevin doesn’t want the pain to stop? 

"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 high octane drama that I made with my students at the San Francisco Art Institute chronicles the moral decline of it's heroine, as the love of a man she obsesses over drives her over something else: a cliff into hell.  It's a free fall all the way to the bottom destination, and there's a heck of a lot of nice looking, young people along for the ride.

Award-winning videomaker Kip Fulbeck brings his blistering pace, comedic skill, and critical eye to bear on the Hapa and Asian American male experience—parodying the relationships between sex, love, and martial arts movies.

A comic monologue, I Was Once Involved in a Shit Show is a recollection of an imaginary art event that tallies with what most artists experience when they are involved in putting on an unfunded group show.

A brief trip to the Miami '09 art festival was the moving (or swimming) force to instigate this travelogue. There are some bathing sequences sprinkled about and lots of munching going on in this latest addition to my Christmas video series. There's even a Santa Claus figure trodding across sand instead of snow; but don't let that dismaying personage in shades of gray discolor an otherwise plentiful poo-poo platter of pulchritude.

A love letter to the Internet from a feral cat in Brooklyn.

Anonymously published to the web in 2006, Valentine for Perfect Strangers was an early example of an art video that "went viral," amassing over a half-million views and landing on the front page of YouTube.

Summer and smoke (from pork chops) filters into every rip in my tee-shirt as legs and souls are bared for the infra-red-hot digital camera that's ON THE PROWL!

A Fourth of July celebration ignites the Id and unleashes a digital demon hungry for imagery of the young and the restless to appease the contraption it sees through: the cannibal camcorder in a state of carniverous conniptions!

"A major influence for generating ideas for me was not what I could contrive on my desktop, but being open and receptive to “accident”. For instance, one evening in 1972 while typing a syllabus for a class on my old Smith Corona typewriter, I happened to see on the TV a documentary by Leni Riefenstahl. German troops were marching, and I found that I could duplicate the “ta ta tum, ta ta tum, ta ta tum tum tum” of the drumbeat by typing “mar mar march mar mar march.“ Had not the broadcast of this film taken place while I was typing, I would never have thought of this concept.