Salon.com > Shana Ting Lipton

Just say Yes

Thu, 23 Sep 2004 20:00:00 +0000

The four male figures standing in the moonlit yard of a Los Angeles hillside house are plotting strategy. And central to it is the 6-foot-tall tree, with bug eyes and a black ministerial hat, standing in front of them.

"That's Smokey the Log, our mascot," explains Mike Bonanno. He and his partner, Andy Bichlbaum, together known as the political prank team the Yes Men, plan to use Smokey the Log in their latest act of activism/performance art. Smokey, it seems, will be deployed during the group's bus tour of presidential swing states to persuade voters to sign petitions stating that they are supporting President Bush's forestry policies and are "promoting global warming," Bichlbaum says.

The Yes Men are sort of like "Jackass" for the MoveOn set, except they set the artistic bar a bit higher. "'Theater' is basically the closest word we could use to describe what we do," Bonanno says, adding emphatically: "It's protest, it's theater, it's performance art. It's identity correction."

“Six Feet’s” muse

Fri, 10 Sep 2004 21:18:00 +0000

The denouement of this season's "Six Feet Under" (season finale Sunday, 9 p.m., on HBO) focuses on creativity itself. Claire (Lauren Ambrose) and her ex-boyfriend Russell (Ben Foster), both art students, are lounging around her apartment stoned. Russell rips out the eyes from a photo of Claire and places them on her lids. She asks him to take a picture, and a photographic concept is born -- one that gives Claire status and a gallery show, but leaves Russell unrecognized.

David Meanix, the Los Angeles artist responsible for the haunting and disturbing photo-collage portraits used in the show, is a real-life Russell. In a bizarre postmodern media twist of life imitating art imitating life, he has been glued to the television each week watching Claire get the credit for his brainchild. He admits to having the same fear as Russell: "I don't want to be unrecognized and have it be 'Claire's work.'"

But mostly, he's thrilled to have an outlet for his work. "I was a huge "Six Feet Under" fan," says the previously unknown Downingtown, Penn., native who pushed hard for his artwork to be on the hit program. "The minute they hinted that Claire was going to art school, fireworks went off telling me that my work should be Claire's work." For two years he hounded Emmy-nominated art director Suzuki Ingerslev.

The ‘stache is back

Thu, 10 Apr 2003 17:43:00 +0000

Last month, a 34-year-old Los Angeles photographer named Dan Monick was invited to a mustache birthday party that a buddy of his was throwing for two girlfriends. The invite showed a picture of the two women, altered in Photoshop to make them look like Frida Kahlo and Salvador Dali. Monick, who has a real 'stache, went to the gathering and found himself in mustache heaven: fake fuzz, real fuzz, on men and women alike.

It's not a party until the cops show up, and this turned out to be a real blowout. "The police were chasing some dude who ran into the party and ran out the back door," explains Monick. "It's like 3 in the morning on Sunset Boulevard and the cops, all of whom have mustaches, come running into a mustache party."

The police promptly ticketed some of the partygoers who were drinking in front of the house. So much for hirsute solidarity.

It' s "Magnum P.I." all over again. Just flip on MTV: The Foo Fighters' frontman, Dave Grohl, has a goatee mustache hybrid, drummer Taylor Hawkins has the real deal (upper lip only). Doctor Matt Destruction of the Hives sports a 'stache, and so does funky rapper Har Mar Superstar. But Angelenos aren't growing facial hair just to mimic their favorite rock stars. No, L.A. is host to the mustache revival because everyone here likes to play a role: daddy, cop, stud, lounge singer, dictator and, lest we forget, porn star.

Weapons of mass instruction

Wed, 06 Nov 2002 03:00:00 +0000

The camera focuses on an engraved brown rock surface -- a primitive relief that depicts human figures congregated around a monolithic object. This first image from the 1983 documentary film "Koyaanisqatsi" launched a trilogy that has taken director Godfrey Reggio more than 20 years to complete.

"Naqoyqatsi," the final film in his series of wordless movies, recently opened in New York and Los Angeles. It ends with a human figure floating through a computer-simulated background. As with the other films in the series, there is no narrative and no dialogue in "Naqoyqatsi" -- just a painstakingly edited assemblage of images set to the haunting and hypnotic original score of composer Philip Glass.

The juxtaposition of how "Koyaanisqatsi" begins and how "Naqoyqatsi" ends gets to the core message of Reggio's work. For him, nature and our self-created world (call it human nature) are so irreconcilable that we live our daily lives in a perpetual state of imbalance.