Satire, Folks.
It's hard to pull off when the world is a fucking farce but it does still happen sometimes. When it's good, I love it.
I saw Dream Scenario the other night. Aside from always kind of loving Nicholas Cage I thought the script and the conceit was very tight. Very cutting. Very funny. In parts, laugh-out-loud-from-pure-discomfort funny. I’ll take it.
The moment, or one of the many moments, we are living in culturally has to do with the viral nature of information, content, branding, sales, cancel culture, trauma, triggers, young vs old, memes, etc. Okay, I guess. Most of culture is driven by most of those. This film takes some of it on in a very precise way. I don’t want to be a spoiler but I will say, it is dark, brutal, bloody in parts, painful and brilliantly funny most of the time. Cage is amazing as is Julianne Nicholson who is always great. If you have any sort of public facing life in any way this film will disturb you. If you are just a spectator, this film may indict you. It indicts all of us.
Along with Network, Three Kings, Tropic Thunder and Being There, this film is up there with some of the great satirical films.
Today I talk to portrait photographer Kate Simon.
I don't know if you knew this about me but I was on the cusp of being an important photographer when I was in high school. Art photography, not journalism or portrait. Okay maybe I’m exaggerating. Photography was an important part of my younger life. I shot quite a bit in high school. I developed my own film and made my own prints. It was the late seventies and I was hanging around a lot of late seventies hipsters and art types in Albuquerque. I worked at a restaurant across the street from the university. My mother was an artist. I was tapped in.
I did a very important photograph my senior year. I will try to explain it to you. Our house sat on a half acre of land. It was winter. The ground had been tilled. It was a chunky, big piece of randomly shaped sod mixed with dead alfalfa blades. I set up a ladder in the middle of the field. I placed 3 or four torso mannequins in the sod. They were arranged as background in random places moving back into the distance. I hooked a work light onto my belt that was plugged into an extension cord. I plugged a small television set into the work light. The set and the light were turned on. It was night, dark. I had my mother hold open the aperture on the camera as I moved toward the ladder with the television. I went up the ladder and placed the TV on top. I then walked around the ladder. Then she closed the aperture.
The effect was amazing. The glowing screen and several blurred versions of me moving around the ladder in one still. I printed it up using a selenium process.
It showed at the end of the year art show. It won first place. I won another time with a portrait I drew of John Lennon. The photo was far more interesting. So much so that it appeared in a small regional magazine called Creative Teens. It was the centerfold. I’m sure many of you may have seen it.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t quite wrap my brain around processing and f-stops and the anxiety of developing negatives. So, I got out of the medium. Thankfully my one masterpiece remains. I have it up in my living room. Powerful. Under appreciated.
I studied the history of photography in college. A year long survey course which changed the way I think about everything.
I like talking to photographers. Kate is wild and was there for the art scene and music scene in NYC and London during the 70s and 80s and did some amazing work. Her book of photographs of the late Bob Marley is now widely available after it was done in a limited run years ago.
On Thursday I talk to Taylor Williamson. He’s a comic I’ve seen around for years and I didn’t realize how funny and original he was. Great talks!
Enjoy!
Boomer, Monkey and LaFonda live!
Love,
Maron
