Andy Seven's Blog, page 21

Je M'appelle Grunt

The new neighbor moved into my building right after 9/11, and his forthright friendliness and good nature was startling, startling because the general behavior of people in my neighborhood was snobby and rude.  He told me his name was Alex and I thought he was the most down to Earth guy I’d met in ages.  Alex said he was an artist and I thought, “Okay, just another artist in L.A.” Wrong.
I learned a lot more about him one night when a couple of kids engaged in some low-rent tagging in the alley behind our building. Alex’s apartment faced the alley so it didn’t take him long to race out and stop the graffiti in progress.  “Hey you guys you can’t tag here!”  The taggers ran a cross between teenage fear and rebellion, keeping their backs up. I stood by my car in the parking lot watching the whole thing.
As Alex got closer to the three kids you could see their bravado deflate and their expressions melt into complete awe at the sight of him.
“Hey, you’re Axis, fuckin’ A!” one kid said."No way, dude!” the other kid yelled.“Dang, that’s Axis from the CBS Crew!” another kid gushed.
Alex aka Axis talked them into taking their act somewhere else and they took off but not until after they bumped fists and told him what big fans they were. My neighbor wasn’t just Alex but a graffiti legend: Axis from the CBS Crew.

Alex played it cool, drinking with me at The Coach & Horses bar on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, working the room and scamming on chicks. It seemed as if he knew everyone in there.
“I’ve got an installation next Friday at a store on Melrose, can you guys make it?” he asked.
“Sure”, I croaked.
“It’s gonna be cool, a few of my paintings’ll be up and I have a few custom made t-shirts and stuff, there’s gonna be a DJ and a bartender there. It’ll be great if you guys could make it”.
When the night we over we got a lift home from a cab driver named Hamlet. I never met a cab driver named Hamlet before; it was crazy.
The art show opening was a different story entirely. Seemed like everyone from The Coach & Horses was at the show and even more. It was the most packed show on Melrose and brought back memories of the old Luz De Jesus when it proudly stood on Melrose & Poinsettia way back when. Alex/Axis’ paintings and t-shirts hung on clothes hangers suspended from butcher‘s meat rails running around the store to the shop window in front.  
But all work and no play is a life wasted so one day I told Axis about a punk rock show starring porn star Bridget The Midget and her band at some tore up from the floor up gay bar in the San Fernando Valley, not Oil Can Harry’s but something just as skanky.
Bridget The Midget’s band was awful, just stale Grade Z punk rock and little Bridget was even worse. She couldn’t sing to save her tiny life and even made a point of overdressing in Army fatigues to hide the fact she earned her dough jigging around naked sucking dick for cash. Wendy O. Williams she wasn’t. She even insulted Axis on stage, a genuine throwdown considering the fact he had a killer band at the time called DWP: Drunk With Power.  
                                                  

Bored with her lopsided hardcore antics on stage, I wandered around the club and noticed a little room in the back all painted red. I got closer to the door and realized there were a lot of bears in leather doing all sorts of weird stuff, when suddenly an arm yanked me away from the door as quickly as possible.
“DUDE! DON’T GO IN THERE!” yelled Axis.  “IT’S NOT YOUR SCENE!”
Well, neither was watching Bridget The Midget so we took off mid-set and headed straight back to The Coach & Horses. But just to show how it’s done, not too long later Axis played with his band The Sickness at The Cinema Bar in Culver City. The Cinema Bar is the greatest club on the planet where hippies and bikers and punks and slacker kids all converge and the drinks are awesome and they play old cowboy records on the jukebox. The place was jam-packed with fuckers of every stripe and Axis had the last word performing after The Porn Midget’s diss.
The Sickness played a sort-of Black Flag punk sludge gone speed metal flug that ripped your ears out and pissed on your brain. Axis ripped out some vicious chord-age while his singer, a Mechanic Destructive Kommando  yowled at the top of his lungs, “BULL-YER-AWL-PIG JE M’APPELLE GRUNT HUFF LA KUNT KILL BZRGLYRGFLG!!!!!” The music sounded like a caveman carrying a heavy boulder up a slippery mountain of mud. The rhythm section pounded evil migraine skullfuck while the amp stranglers shrieked in your face all night. The audience dug their shit, immensely.                                  
But one of the most memorable nights was when our girlfriends were out of town for Christmas in 2002 and we hit Max’s on Fairfax Avenue. We tossed back our drinks and talked about the psychopaths in the neighborhood ("Who's gonna get locked up next?") when suddenly the room was filled with Clash records played at ear-splitting volume, and it wasn’t their shit disco crap, it was all the good punk rock records, too: Complete Control, City of The Dead, Janie Jones, 1977, What’s My Name, I Fought The Law. “This is great!” I told the bartender. “Why all The Clash records?”
“Didn’t you hear the news -  Joe Strummer died yesterday”.

So that was Christmas in 2002, Clash records played loud enough to shake the walls with Axis talking the bartender into letting him mix some Chocolate Cake drink behind the bar. It only goes to show that art isn’t just about painting but playing the loudest racket or mixing the wickedest drink or just making people crazy with the art of living. Axis gets it all done. 
To see more of Axis' art, go to stylepig.com

District 9 (South Africa, 2009)

 
District 9 achieves the impossible: it’s a film that manages to merge science fiction, political satire, comedy and action hero testosteronics without dropping any balls. It all works flawlessly and perhaps that’s why it earned an Academy Award Best Picture Nomination in 2010 (The Hurt Locker won).

Neil Blomkamp’s first film is a stunner: a gigantic space ship from an unexplained planet is land-locked over Johannesburg, South Africa with all the aliens aboard (called “Prawns”) near death and dehydrated. After being “rescued” they are sent an internment camp which quickly turns into a beat slum where they are largely neglected.

The discrimination takes a turn for the ugly when a munitions company called MNU (Multi-National United) begins a program to have them all kicked out of their shacks in the largely fenced off area. Most of this is shot in a reality show documentary style, almost overshadowing the excellent CGI effects of the Prawns arguing with the authorities.

A cheerful, bumbling stooge of a bureaucrat, Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley) is assigned to head the eviction project. Although he believes he’s been assigned this task for his dedication to MNU it’s revealed that he’s the boss’ son-in-law. Copley plays van der Merwe with an Inspector Clouseau-style obliviousness.

The discrimination and persecution of the Prawns in South Africa brings up several parallels to apartheid, however in this film even the blacks bully the Prawns terribly, especially local gangster Obesandjo and his thugs.

During a routine eviction of Prawn scientist Christopher Johnson (Jason Cope) Wikus finds a canister of Prawn biochemicals that explode in his face, causing him to develop black nose bleeds, frequent lapses in consciousness, and culminating in his development of a Prawn claw. Wikus, after experiencing a nightmarish medical examination, escapes from MNU pursuit to hide in District 9. These scenes recall not one, but two classic Franz Kafka short stories: The Metamorphosis and In The Penal Colony.


At this point of the film the tempo changes from fake documentary and comedy to suspense and action film. Wikus wakes up to the fact he’s been played for a stooge, dumped from his job and his wife and a prime candidate for dissection by both the MNU and the insane Obesandjo (Eugene Khumbanyiwa).

Wikus begs scientist prawn Johnson to hide him much to Johnson’s chagrin, only relenting when he sees his son taking a liking Wikus’ newly grown claw (“He’s one of us”.) Wikus plans a suicide run back to the lab that kept him to recover the cylinder Johnson spent twenty years collecting to enable his spaceship to fly back to his planet. It’s never fully explained how the spaceship rocket fuel can transform an Earthling into a Prawn.

Without getting further into the story there are a lot of action film battle sequences between the newly prawned Wikus against the MNU (esp. a sadistic soldier named Koobus, played with moustache twirling villainy by David James) and the Obesandjo Gang.

While I’m not much of a CGI fan I have to confess that the CGI aliens are outstanding and the audio for their weird voices are bizarre, sounding like a cross between a clicking taxi cab radio and a dying tuba. As stated earlier, there are quite a few references to South African apartheid but on a planetary scale. Copley’s performance as Wikus is excellent, shifting gears from bumbling idiot to persecuted Earth citizen with equal intensity. Come to think of it, District 9 isn’t all that different from The Hurt Locker; it’s The Hurt Locker as co-written by Franz Kafka and Harlan Ellison.

*************************
There have been many versions of Crime and Punishment in the cinema, the Peter Lorre version being somewhat good to the awful Crispin Glover–starred update, but there will never be one as nutty as the Southern California hipster version made in 1959, retitled “Crime and Punishment USA”.

Directed by the great Denis Sanders, Crime and Punishment USA is George Hamilton’s maiden voyage as leading man, and he plays the accused killer simply named Robert with an Anthony Perkins-type reptilian aplomb*. The story takes place in groovy Venice, California with a lot of awesome location shots at Pacific Ocean Park (P.O.P. also seen in “Movin’ With Nancy”), and while much is made of beatnik culture with Hamilton kicking back playing bongos with bullfight posters draping his pad, you can tell the Sixties are rolling right in to burst through the walls at any minute.

A few familiar faces are here, too: Frank Silvera from Stanley Kubrick’s “Killer’s Kiss” plays the dogged police inspector Lt. Porter, constantly trying to get Hamilton to confess to his crimes and presenting endless hypotheses about the act of murder. Hamilton laughs in his face and says he’s too good looking to be guilty of any crime, so typical of Southern California narcissism which is so rampant today. When Silvera asks him what he’s majoring in college, Hamilton says, “Politics –I hope to run for office someday”. Haw!

Mary Murphy from “The Wild One” plays a sexless prostitute who befriends Hamilton and allows him to read her diary so he can scream at her with schizo delusional superiority. The overabundance of dialogue would be punishing if it wasn’t for the sheer absurdity of what the actors are being given to read. It’s like a deadpan comedy version of Dostoevsky filtered through a dying beatnik’s cold, dying fingers. Regardless of who’s doing what to whom this is George Hamilton’s show all the way. And it freaks me out!

*It's interesting to note that three years later Orson Welles directed Anthony Perkins in a modern version of Kafka's classic "The Trial". Could Orson have gotten his inspiration after seeing this movie? Nobody's talking. :)

Fractured Fashion Flickers

Well, this has been a pretty action-packed week at Viva Rebecca. Anybody who thinks that making clothes is for pussies has another think coming, because a lot of it's pretty physical, more physical than banging on a stupid guitar like a fucking chimp. This is a brief summary of what's happened in the past few days:

(Mon): Spent the better part of the day tearing apart a plus-sized astronaut suit for a private client. By plus-sized I mean that the client is 400+ pounds, so this isn't Buzz Aldrin territory we're talking about. All of the components have to be super-sized and accuracy is absolutely crucial. Working in tandem with that is Rebecca's space alien outfit for the upcoming Barbie convention, which utilizes mixed media of leather, vinyl and multi-colored sequins.

(Tues): Went to The Sword and The Stone in Burbank (http://www.swordandstone.com)to do a fitting for three gigantic statues, two male and one female. All three statues are at least ten feet tall and have to be measured on a ladder and then draped with pattern paper and after, muslin. A lot of crawling around and climbing involved. I left my church goin' clothes at home!

(Wed): Got my two pair of pants in the mail from GuyLook (http://www.guylook.com) from South Korea, a great menswear mail order house. One pair was a wonderful checkered thing, and the other pair was a cool green biker jeans. Lucky I fit perfectly in them as the sizes are very Asian (largest size is a 33 waist). Bless you, YMCA.

Girls are calling Rebecca up for a job trying to replace me. Uh, yeah you can replace me when you can sew, serge, baste any kind of fabric, unpick microscopically tiny seams, draft patterns, trace and cut every kind of material including fur, shop for fabric in the Garment District in less than two hours and still shut the fuck up about your boyfriend problems, bitches.

(Thrs): Went swatching for leather at United Leather in downtown Los Angeles (http://www.unitedleather.com), probably the closest thing LA has to SH Frank in San Francisco, a veritable endless cove of leather, suede and even furs. Love the textured leather and the prices were reasonable.

The phone's ringing off the hook from production companies requesting our services, so thankfully business is picking up again. What a nightmare year 2012 was.

(Fri): Los Angeles Magazine ran a feature on Julie Newmar's top 10 favorite places in LA and listed Viva Rebecca, us on it. Here's the link: (http://www.lamag.com/laculture/mylatoz/2013/06/19/my-la-to-z-julie-newmar?fb_action_ids=10151749475153628&fb_action_types=og.likes&fb_source=aggregation&fb_aggregation_id=288381481237582). And I still managed to find time to make a t-shirt dress for Rebecca and put the finishing touches to my upcoming crime novel - for release in August, 2013 (hopefully).

******************************

Lately I've been going crazy over Jo Ghost shoes, whose men's shoes are beautifully designed and use only the best and most exotic leathers money can buy. Their shoes are colorful without being too fruity (i.e. Miami Vice) and the designs are some of the most imaginative this side of John Fluevog.

The 1788 Inglese Multi-Color is a terrific boot using three different shades of leather with a lace-up front. I also like the Antik Submarine shoe which uses a colored stingray pebbled finish, and there's also the 1838 with its endless rows of eyelets and laces, looking just like a roller skate shoes without the plate and wheels.

So why don't I own more Jo Ghost shoes? Well, Jo Ghost, based in Italy, on average sell their shoes for at least $400, much too much rich for my blood. Yeah, you need gold blood to afford these babies. But if you have gold blood run don't walk to get your Jo Ghosts, more commonly found at Haute Footwear (http://www.hautefootwear.com/catalog). They can also be found at Dellamoda (http://www.dellamoda.com).

******************************

Finally got my hands on the S/S 2013 Another Man Magazine, the best men's fashion magazine on the planet, esp. since Homme Essential went Hollywood and preppy in the past year. If you liked The Face Magazine from the Eighties then you'll like this also a lot. There is so much rock & roll style in this fash mag that you'll think you're looking at the hippest rock magazine ever.

Although the cover shows Arctic Monkeys lead singer Alex Turner on the cover there's hipper people to be found inside, like a feature on Nick Cave's sartorial style from his days as grub monster in The Birthday Party to his 3-piece suit look in The Bad Seeds. There's also a photo shoot with Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream and a sneak preview to Richard Hell's upcoming memoirs. I also liked the piece that matched eerily similar quotes on style from Johnny Thunders and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Very cool!

If you like your models either Quadrophenia-style with purple and pink hair or the decadent Seventies Keith Richards beehive boy look, every page just explodes with rock energy, with fashions that include a great Hermes leather t-shirt, Lanvin bondage pants, Jeffery West rocker boots and old Ralph Lauren even has a few rocker threads to show off in here. Another Man is published bi-annually and if you don't mind coughing up $15 an issue it'll sit on your hipster coffee table proudly.

Top illustration: Elvis by Donfeld, from the book "Hollywood Sketchbook".