THE ETERNALS This Chicago-based trio blends a cornucopia of samples, synthesizers, bass, drums, and vocals into a futuristic sound that comes tumbling at you. Their new album, Rawar Style, gives nods to the Clash, African Head Charge, Capleton, and Sun Ra, among others. Despite the hybrid, the final product is sheer originality. Past, present, and future coexist as something Eternal.

PERSONS OF INTEREST Of the more than five thousand people questioned after September 11, an untold number were Muslims arrested on American soil for minor immigration violations (or more often for no legal reason at all) and then detained in secret while the government tried to link them to terrorist activity. Filmed in 2002, Alison Maclean and Tobias Perse’s documentary presents twelve interviews with former “special interest” detainees. The subject is heartrending, and Persons has a unique formal strategy to match: Shot from a fixed vantage point in a cell-like room built for the production, the film doesn’t hide the sometimes awkward interactions between filmmaker and subject that usually get edited out. The bumbling questions, even the condescension in the directors’ voices (most evident when they try to cajole an interviewee into removing his baseball cap to suit their lighting), strangely amplify the urgency of these testimonies.

Alison Maclean and Tobias Perse, Persons of Interest, 2004, still from a color digital video transferred to 35 mm film, 63 minutes.

ELAD LASSRY Lassry is fascinated with the canyons of LA, where he takes provocative and affecting portraits of rarely dressed and often dirty young men, who happen to be artists. The canyons themselves are neatly manicured in some areas and wildly overgrown in others—a terrain that seems to speak of both availability and limits. Replaying the ’70s genres of Earth and body art, Lassry’s subjects appear distinctly self-conscious and uncomfortable. Bohemianism ain’t what it used to be.

DESTINO After a 1937 trip to Hollywood, Salvador Dalí wrote to André Breton that he had met the “three great American surrealists”—the Marx Brothers, Cecil B. DeMille, and Walt Disney. This seven-minute cartoon, a collaboration between Dalí and Disney, is amazing because it’s just that: a collaboration between Dalí and Disney. Started in 1946, the project was deemed a money loser and abandoned after eight months, only to be rescued and completed last year by Disney animators in Paris. Watching a Disneyesque ballerina traipse through a melting Dalí landscape, I was struck by the thought that little kids—with their unblinking acceptance of talking crickets and fairy-tale endings—make the best surrealists.

Salvador Dalí’s Destino, Dir. Dominique Monfery, 2003, still from a color digital video transferred to 35 mm film, 7 minutes.

JORGE LUIS ALVAREZ PUPO, TRANCE Sweat, darkness, fire, men at night, visions, the spirit world: Cuban photographer Jorge Luis Alvarez Pupo’s black-and-white photographs, published in 2003 by Perceval Press, have an elusive, shadowy feeling befitting their subject matter—the religious rites of voodoo and Santeria. Pupo bears passionate witness to the intensity of spiritual life in his native country with the simple release of the camera’s shutter.

ALEX DONUTS What cracks me up about Alex Donuts is that it’s not called Alex’s Donuts. Also a sign over the cash register says, “We don’t accept twenties unless they’re for Mary’s tip jar.” Sandwiched between an alley and a dry cleaner in a strip mall near the corner of Franklin and Argyle, this is the place for the best chocolate glazeds in LA.

Alex Donuts, Los Angeles, 2004. Photo: Russell Bates.

UNDER THE BANNER OF HEAVEN: A STORY OF VIOLENT FAITH In a time when people are increasingly turning to religion for answers (witness the Republican National Convention, where I spent four days taking pictures—yikes!), Jon Krakauer’s book about the Mormon Church offers a riveting perspective on our nation. Krakauer weaves a history of the fastest-growing American-born religion with the horrific account of two fundamentalist Mormon brothers who murdered their sister-in-law and her baby in 1984—ostensibly on God’s orders. What The Executioner’s Song was for the ’80s, Under the Banner of Heaven is for our time. The two books form a dark portrait of America and the relative nature of piety.

“BEFORE THE END (THE LAST PAINTING SHOW)” Curated by painter Olivier Mosset, this show at the Swiss Institute in New York last month revolved around the idea that many conceptual artists were once abstract painters producing minimal, often monochromatic work. It wasn’t the blank surfaces of these “last paintings” that attracted me, though, but the feeling of nostalgia they inspired. Standing in the gallery I thought of all the “last times” in my life that I’d registered too late. I kiss a friend goodbye on the street corner after spending the afternoon together watching bad movies, and it’s not until much later that I think, “Wow, that was the last time I ever saw him.”

END OF THE CENTURY: THE STORY OF THE RAMONES First Joey, then Dee Dee, now Johnny. Within a few short years we’ve suffered the untimely deaths of all but one of the original Ramones. Jim Fields and Michael Gramaglia’s documentary chronicles the story of one of the most influential bands never to make the Top 40. Johnny had this to say: “It’s a very dark movie. It’s accurate. It left me disturbed.” Coming from the man (a Republican!) who once pleaded, “Gimme gimme shock treatment,” that’s really saying something. End of the Century also features the final interview with another recently deceased punk luminary, the Clash’s Joe Strummer. The Ramones said it themselves: “The bubble’s going to explode. Probably never live to get old.”

End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones, 2003, still from a color digital video transferred to 35 mm film, 110 minutes. Johnny Ramone, Joey Ramone, and Dee Dee Ramone.

BACON A shout-out not to the artist, nor the actor, but to something from the abattoir.

Table of Contents - November 2004
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