Humor

Fantasy Suite was the last standard definition video I made from VHS tapes. Like WHS VHS #1, I made it to premiere at Roots & Culture’s Zummer Tapez, and speed manipulation figured heavily into its construction (the Bachelor material was not interesting or even tolerable at normal speed, but slowed down slightly, it became fascinating to me). Shana Moulton’s work was a strong influence on this video (I programmed my piece to play after hers in the Zummer mixtape), hence the animated facial masks and SkyMall imagery.

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.

In this attempt to resolve the on-going crisis, Burns and Discenza find themselves in, variously, a childrens adventure playground, a garage and a yard. They utilize a mechanical digger to dig the soil, they toil at skipping and pogo-ing, they vacuum each other. Eventually a type of surgery is performed.

This title is also available on HalfLifers: Rescue Series and HalfLifers: The Complete History.

Cats meow and claw at exits beyond the reach of those who suffer within the walls of their own litter boxes.

A music-filled tour of Christmas good cheer overtakes this gastronomically oriented excursion through the winter season of discontent and yuletime yearnings craving ignition.

In Final Exit, an aged one is confronted with his options in blunt terms. Does he want to drag out his existence, increasingly infirm and a burden to his caretakers, or go quietly before resentment overwhelms sentiment? Does he wish to go on living, the quality of his life increasingly diminishing, or be euthanized? Would he prefer cremation or burial? This video confronts the issues of mortality and advancing decrepitude that faces even the friskiest.

Segalove relates a tale from her childhood of a man's exposure with text (“the painter wagged it at me right here”), while an arrow blinks over a shot of the house where she grew up. Segalove narrates: “I looked down and expected to see a can of green paint. I saw a pink penis instead, peeking out of the fly of his pants... I wondered how it had got so pink; had he painted it too?” This and four other memorable stories are humorously presented in a series of video one-liners.

Snow falls gently in the background as kielbasa is cut and Walter Kapsuta mans the accordian in this Christmas special. Also on board is filmmaker Sharon Greytak, as she and I discuss matters of the flesh and joints. The snowscapes of Connecticut and the Bronx are viewed through the filter of domestic hellishness. Full of ominous Christmas cheer.

flight is a frame-by-frame re-editing of an astronaut walking on the moon into a seven-minute long meditation on technological transcendence. The unstable, stuttering image depicts the astronaut's struggle to separate from his body. Comically majestic, the astronaut enacts a late 20th Century ballet. A performance of anti-heroic stumbling, falling down, and disappearance into white light.

This title is also available on Les LeVeque Videoworks: Volume 1.

The foliage and sprouting of urban greenery becomes the subject of this celebration to all things pollinated. The video explores hidden gardens that lie sequestered amid an array of dwellings inhabited by the not so rich and famous. Felines creep amid the blossoms as human entities enrich the soil with their leaking desires.

A photographer comes to my home to take pictures and gets a lensful. His mouth and his shutter snap away as I aim my finest attributes at his cold and hard equipment.

Wobbly's very eccentric approach to music produces sounds and noises that consistently battles Anne McGuire's melodic voice. Anne's lyrics turned poems find a very differenct life in her performances as Freddy McGuire. The video Lottery Ticket is a collaboration with Fou Fou Ha! and Torsten Kretchzmar. Although the dancers of Fou Fou Ha! usually wear colorful, crazy outfits for their comical buffoonery dance performances, in this video it's all about abstract numbers.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles — drones — have become an everyday feature of contemporary military activity, replacing humans in reconnaissance flights, small-scale combat missions and covert operations. The U.S. Army operates some ten thousands UAVs — a six-fold increase during Obama's term — deploying them over locations like Pakistan and Yemen.

"Actions, states, one B+W video camera, the Paik Abe Colorizer, a video switcher. The two states, a b a b, I put my hand in the camera frame and saw a colored hand shifting. I moved my, the, hand, including back and forth, realizing or connecting to the visual and language potential of front hand and back hand. Giving it some veracity, the pace became about attempting to keep up with the position changes together with verbally reciting front hand back hand, co-coordinating from hand to mouth and mouth to hand."

– Peer Bode

Storms threaten to tarnish the Golden State as I wander through the rooms of my apartment, seeking a high in the lowering barometric pressure. Many mementos create a series of flashbacks to warm the cockles in our most secret places—some of those places being blatantly revealed in this cockle-warming picture.

The filmmaker accepts the challenge of the philosopher and changes not only a table but also chairs, shoes, jugs, teapots and almost everything else lying around his house.

"What prevents me from supposing that this table either vanishes or alters its shape when no one is observing it and then when someone looks at it again changes back? But one feels like saying – who is going to suppose such a thing?"

— Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969)

This horror picture is a sequel to THE KISS OF FRANKENSTEIN (a one act play I wrote a few years ago which was performed by my graduate students at the San Francisco Art Institute). This one was made on the main campus and features Linda Martinez reprising the role of Sherri Frankenstein who is MAD AS HELL AND NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE! The budget given us was $400 but the picture looks big and robust, thanks to the attractive and healthy looking cast of students and guest performers who bring this tale of family vengeance to a rousing and tuneful finale.

Using footage from the legendary Bruce Lee’s last, unfinished, film, Fulbeck turns the subtitled martial arts movie on itself—levelling criticism and commentary with the genre's own tools, and examining the various representative functions of the late actor.

“To master the one-minute time span requires considerable discipline, and few pieces, if any, had been shaped as genuine miniatures—most having the appearance of being extracts from larger works. The notable exception was John Smith’s Gargantuan, which was not only the right length for the idea, but actually incorporated a triple pun on the word ‘minute.’”

— Nicky Hamlyn, “One Minute TV 1992”, Vertigo (Spring 1993)

"A wonderfully witty example of how to conduct pillow talk with a small amphibian."

— Elaine Paterson, Time Out London

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.

As a video journal shot by George Kuchar’s students in his Underground Drama class at the San Francisco Art Institute, George Kuchar Goes to Work offers a unique glimpse into the frenzied chaos that was his directing method. Documenting the production of a new video with the help of his class, Kuchar orchestrates everything from women in cages and flaming baby dolls to explosive blood splatters and ballet dancing. A high school student also happens upon the set during a visit to the college.

This very funny video plays with the identification of the camera as phallus, as an instrument of power and domination intruding upon reality; never an innocent bystander, it is always the organizing locus of events. Over sequences in which the camera/viewer approaches entrances to houses, shops, and other buildings, the soundtrack carries the moans of a man and woman reaching orgasm. The pitch and urgency of their moaning increases as the camera nears and finally penetrates its target.

The pages of books that deal with nostalgia and the vanishing vistas of America's past are infiltrated by the appreciative presence of two hulks from today, who go their own ways through the by-ways and highways of an illustrated yesteryear. One salutes the creator of this painted paradise, while the other delves within himself to vomit up columnous verbiage amidst the detailed backdrops. 

“In The Girl Chewing Gum a commanding voiceover appears to direct the action in a busy London street. As the instructions become more absurd and fantasized, we realize that the supposed director (not the shot) is fictional; he only describes—not prescribes—the events that take place before him. Smith embraced the ‘spectre of narrative’ (suppressed by structural film) to play word against picture and chance against order.

Craggy, ice-encrusted peaks soar skyward as blue lagoons lap incessantly to the drumbeats of big city behemoths hellbent on halibut and hashbrowns! The magic and grandeur of glacier-masked real estate is here for all to see and digest in this bountiful serving of natural delights.