THE DISTRICTS
ORIGINAL TRACKS is a monthly series, brought to you by ORIGINAL PENGUIN and FLOOD Magazine, featuring performances and interviews from some of today's most unique and talented artists. Check regularly at ORIGINALPENGUIN.COM for the latest episodes!
#BeAnOriginal
FRENSHIP
FRANKIE COSMOS
MODERN BASEBALL
NOGA EREZ
11 A LETTER FROM THE EDITOR 12 APROPOS OF NOTHING 16 BREAKING: JENNY JAFFE, SUNITA MANI, SINZIANA VELICESCU 24 IS EVERYTHING AWESOME? A PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY WITH NICK RIGGLE 30 STRANGE RELICS: ANDREW VAN BAAL IN JOSHUA TREE 40 SAGE VAUGHN GETS REAL 56 CONGRATULATIONS TIM HEIDECKER AND ERIC WAREHEIM ON YOUR TEN-YEAR ANNIVERSARY, GREAT JOB!
FLOOD MAGAZINE IS PUBLISHED BY FLOOD MAGAZINE LLC, 542 N. LARCHMONT BLVD., LOS ANGELES CA 90004. VOLUME 1, NUMBER 7, 2017. FLOOD MAGAZINE IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANYTHING, INCLUDING THE RETURN OR LOSS OF SUBMISSIONS, OR FOR ANY DAMAGE OR OTHER INJURY TO UNSOLICITED MANUSCRIPTS OR ARTWORK. ANY SUBMISSION OF A MANUSCRIPT OR ARTWORK SHOULD INCLUDE A SELF-ADDRESSED ENVELOPE OR PACKAGE OF APPROPRIATE SIZE, BEARING ADEQUATE RETURN POSTAGE. ©2017 FLOOD MAGAZINE LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. FLOOD IS DISTRIBUTED FOR FREE IN SELECT LOCATIONS AND AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE AT FLOODMAGAZINE.COM PRINTED IN CANADA
COVER ART BY SAGE VAUGHN | TABLE OF CONTENTS PHOTO BY ANDREW VAN BAAL
64 OBEDIENCE AND HOPE: SHEPARD FAIREY’S WAY UP
PUNK AS FUCK, A NEW VIDEO SERIES HOSTED BY DAMIAN ABRAHAM LIVE NOW ON FLOOD MAGAZINE. PAF LOS ANGELES FEATURING STEVE ALBINI, JOHN DOE, BRYAN RAY TURCOTTE, THE SMELL, MOBY, OKI DOG AND MORE. — PAF LOS ANGELES 10 0 3
FL LO OO OD D F
EPISODE ONE FEATURING RECORDING AND ENGINEER MASTER STEVE ALBINI & GERMS DRUMMER DON BOLLES.
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
While we were in the middle of putting this latest issue of FLOOD together, Jim Carrey found himself inexplicably in the news. At a New York Fashion Week event, Carrey decided to divert questions about the event’s theme—icons—with talk about tetrahedrons, fields of energy, and existentialism. “I don’t exist,” he insisted, before clarifying that neither did anyone else, relatively speaking, and that nothing matters. “But Jim,” replied E!’s Catt Sadler. “You got really dressed up for the occasion.” Regardless of what you think of Carrey’s philosophy, the interview’s viral impact ended up partially countering his stance, especially given the reason why everyone was there in the first place: those pesky icons. We stopped what we were doing, hit play on the video, and talked about it—in person and online, fractured across landscapes and domains—precisely because Carrey is just that: an icon. Icons are not inherently good or bad, and they should be questioned as much as admired, but they are inherently necessary, if for nothing else than to centralize dialogue. From a position of influence, they’re able to start conversations—be they about whether we exist or whatever—on a large level. (Subtweet: Taylor Swift.) We, the general public, can then decide to keep those conversations moving or focus our attention elsewhere. After liking and sharing the Carrey video, and subscribing to E!’s YouTube channel, it occurred to me that the whole bizarre Fashion Week affair recalled Fiona Apple’s 1997 VMAs speech, when she notoriously accepted an award by saying, “This world is bullshit.” Apple was referring to the self-congratulatory world of entertainment and celebrity, and, though the pull quote is what’s most remembered, she was actually coming around to the point that people should always think for themselves about what’s cool. Twenty years later and she’s more right than ever, of course. There’s so much to what’s been put within the pages of this magazine, but the crux of it is: This is what we think is cool. These are the musicians, artists, filmmakers, photographers, writers, and on and on that are starting the conversations that we want to have—and we want to invite you, fellow cluster of tetrahedrons, to join in as well. But we also want you to make that decision for yourself.
— Nate Rogers, Associate Editor
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Questions for David Byrne, 1977–1985 by Marty Sartini Garner
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· Is this a party? Is this a disco? Do you have time for this now? · Will time change me? Will money change me? Is there some kind of solid answer you can give me? · Might I get what I’m after? Also, do you happen to know the weather forecast? · Is this the place? · Is that your beautiful house? Is that your beautiful wife? · I find my rural community oppressive. Do you have any advice for me? · Was she?
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Robert Christgau’s Consumer Guide to the App Store
by Alex Machock
Instagram [2010]
Uber [2009]
When Iggy (that’d be Pop mind you) yowled about the TV Eye all the more lascivious-minded of you had on him, I doubt he could have predicted the immensity of fifteen-thousand strangers leering at you every half second. Move over geezers, the people have spoken: There’s a new Iggy in town. I suppose it counts for nothing that I was there that night in ’71 at Max’s Kansas City when Pop crawled onstage and threw up on Geri Miller, prompting Miles Davis to give me a low-five while Allen Ginsberg cried in the corner—boy oh boy, you can bet at least he LOOKED good! Ah well, there are no prizes for being first. B-
Usually when I want to imitate the jet set I’ll throw on Minute by Minute and be done with it. Who needs punk rock when you’ve got nothing left to rail against—aren’t we all millionaires now, complete with chauffeured Caddy and our own private driver? I predict that in a year even saxophones will be cool again—except you Ornette, sorry, but nobody wants nuthin’ to do with your white noise. Now if only Christopher Cross would start a yacht-share company, we’d all be that much closer to paradise. C
Twitter [2006] Maybe you’re like me and years ago you thought it might be fun to stay up all night with five transistor radios blaring five different frequencies at the same exact time. Maybe, and I’m carbon dating myself here, you thought the last time you heard such an incoherent racket was sometime around side two of After Bathing at Baxter’s. Maybe you’re not like me and this sounds like a good idea worth sharing with millions of masochists worldwide. Hard as it may be to believe, even I have an editor these days. C+
Vine [2012/reissue] Ol’ Andy may have coined the indelible “Fifteen Minutes of Fame,” but here we’ve streamlined them down to mere seconds. Six of them, that is. That’s all the Ramones ever needed, anyhow. Sure, everyone can be a star—that’s boring. Now everyone can be a has-been as well. What would Andy on my wall think of all this, if only he could see us now? Not that he would; he’d be too busy bombarding the damn thing until everyone else gave up from sheer exhaustion. Still, I’ll take the Shmoney Dance over Chelsea Girls any day. B+
Shazam [1999] Newsflash for all you crate-diggers/wax-junkies/record snobs: Your deep cuts don’t mean jack shit to a twelve-year-old with an iPhone. The stakes have been raised—you think that Gary Wilson single is gonna impress anyone Down at The Rock & Roll Club where you somehow weaseled your way into hosting a DJ set? We’re talking true obscurity here—private pressings, novelty gospel records, reelto-reel tapes of Kim Fowley’s farts. That’s where the real cutting edge lies. At this very moment I’m funding my retirement through eBay auctions of Quarrymen 45s paid for by some precocious twerp’s lifetime of allowance money. Hell, what fun is it pretending to love Half Japanese now that even your bedwetting niece has memorized The Band That Would Be King? A-
Tinder [2012] Will feign interest in your intimate knowledge of Spanish Harlem but ultimately won’t return your Coltrane records. (“Ashley,” “Meredith”)
FFLLOOOODD
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Can, Ege Bamyasi · Weezer, Maladroit · Brooklyn Raga Massive, Terry Rile
The Coppolas, Ranked
by Nate Rogers
11) The Rooney dude
4) Jason Schwartzman
“Blueside” is a dope song, but put on a whole Rooney album and it’s hard not to feel like you’re in that club when Marissa catches Luke cheating.
Amazing that, due to his tour-de-force performance as Ringo in Dewey Cox, no one even remembers that he’s been in five Wes Anderson movies.
10) Marc “The Cope” Coppola
3) Sofia Coppola
Says something when you’re the one in the family to make off with the nickname “The Cope.” Says even more when your DJ name used to be “Dr. Metal.”
Fucking nailed that part as the baby in The Godfather.
Willing to accept the fact that she may very well end up being peak Coppola once she hits her stride. But, just for reference, when Francis was her age—thirty—he had just written Patton, OK?
8) Christopher Coppola He and his cat Otto were on an episode of Cats 101 once (riding a motorcycle together), and that’s honestly worth a lot in my book.
7) Talia Shire Responsible for the greatest “vaffanculo you” in film history. Also, that Carlo Rizzi: What an asshole, right?
Gets points for making The Conversation and Jack, but loses points for insisting on saying, “I’m the paterfamilias” everywhere he goes.
1) Nicolas Cage Two quotes stand out from Actually Great Actor Nicolas Cage: “My motto had always been: maximum violence immediately” and “I’ll show you acting,” the latter of which being something he told his Uncle Francis at the age of fifteen. Eat it, Uncle Francis. Cage showed you. Scanned by CamScanner
9) Gia Coppola
2) Francis Ford Coppola
6) Eleanor Coppola Directed her first feature narrative at the age of eighty—and made it a semi-autobiographical film starring Diane Lane no less!! Mad respect.
5) Roman Coppola Pissed off just about everyone who saw A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III, which is a vintage Coppola move.
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)” · Pope, Fiction · The Thermals, Now We Can See · Surf Curse, Nothing Yet · Deakin, Sleep Cycle · Alex Cameron, Forced Witness
· Hüsker Dü, New Day Rising · Gilberto Gil, Expresso 2222 · Danny Brown, Atrocity Exhibition · Liz Phair, Whip-Smart
Music we listened to while making FLOOD 7
ey in C · Kamasi Washington, Harmony of Diff erence · Hiroshi Yoshimura, Music for Nine Post Cards · Pauline Anna Strom, Trans-
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by Mike LeSuer
“Without music, life would be a mistake; yet it does not matter what we do or what we say, ’cause nothing matters anyway.” “Faith: not wanting to know what the truth is. Fear: face everything and rise.” “I tear my heart open, I sew myself shut; my weakness is that I care too much. And my scars remind me that everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen.” “One must give value to their existence by behaving as if one’s very existence were a work of art. Suffocation, no breathing—don’t give a fuck if I cut my arm bleeding.” “And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music. We—the future, the twenty-first-century dyslexic, glue sniffing cyber sluts with homicidal minds and handguns—we are insane, nothing will change.” “I’m out here on my own. I’m giving it a go alone. I’m begging on my knees. Is there a God to save me? (No x10)” “Become who you are! I’m the leader of the broken hearts.” “That which does not kill us makes us less weak. I’m saying something, don’t turn your fucking cheek.”
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Millennia Music · Acetone, 1992–2001 · Dungen, Häxan (Versions by Prins Thomas) · Black Sabbath, Sabotage · Superc
Quiz: Nietzsche Quote or Papa Roach Lyric?
hunk, Here’s Where the Strings Come In · Fiona Apple, Extraordinary Machine · Steely Dan, The Royal Scam · E-40, “Choices (Yu
BREAKING
JENNY JAFFE EVERY HERO HAS AN ORIGIN STORY, and Jenny Jaffe—fictional hero of her own short-and-sweet webseries Neurotica, and, with her open and honest discussions, a real-life hero in a worldwide push to destigmatize mental health—is no exception: “I feel like I was bitten by a radioactive Strangers with Candy,” she says. The cult-classic Comedy Central series, an episodic after-school special from Hell, brought Amy Sedaris and Stephen Colbert nationwide notoriety among ’90s comedy nerds, but it also brought something unexpected to young Jaffe as she grew up overwhelmed by bullying, anxiety, and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder: self-care. “Consuming comedy was one way I dealt with having a lot of alone time and being too nervous to leave the house,” she explains. “I remember, in fifth or sixth grade, a family friend gave me a DVD box set of Blackadder. It’s such a great show, and the very end—spoiler alert for a forty-year-old show—is the saddest episode of TV. It hadn’t occurred to me that comedy could hold so many different things at once. I got really into a lot of British comedy from there… Fry & Laurie, The Mighty Boosh, Garth Marenghi, and Strangers with Candy on the American homefront. If I soaked in as much comedy as I could at any given time, then I didn’t have to listen to the thoughts in my head.”
BACKSTORY: A writer/actress/comedian who advocates for mental health while spinning her struggles into singular stories FROM: Raised in the Bay Area, and then worked as a freelance writer for years in New York before heading to LA YOU MIGHT KNOW HER FROM: Project UROK, a nonprofit that offers reassurance as a resource for teens, or from her large portfolio of online pieces both humorous and humanitarian NOW: At the lead of IFC’s new webseries Neurotica, a romcom about bonding through bondage
The flaws of her comedy heroes gave her the strength to openly talk about—and, eventually, joke about—her challenges with depression, OCD, and suicidal ideation. “Maria Bamford was the first person I ever heard talk about OCD the way I experienced it. For people who have dealt with significant mental health issues, that optimism is really hard-earned and it’s the optimism you need to say, ‘I’m going to continue to live, even though it’s a nightmare to be inside my own head.’
BY ERIC STOLZE 16
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“I like characters—especially female characters—who are confident,” she adds. “But it’s hard to find female comedy characters who are overtly sexually confident. I wanted to find a character who was really confident in that regard but has a set of other things she’s dealing with.” With that in mind, Jaffe created Ivy, a sunny, small-town dominatrix who has conquered her OCD to become the best sadist she can be—only to face a relapse when a “megadungeon” threatens to spring up across town and take her business. (A sadomasochistic You’ve Got Mail, in other words.) Rather than leaning on lewd jokes or easy gags (no pun intended), Neurotica packs its short run time with inclusive humor unusual for sex comedy—or any comedy, for that matter. “This is something of a comedy mission statement from me. It’s silly and positive and nonjudgmental about all kinds of people,” she professes. “Everybody’s got their secret sex thing. I think it’s not funny, and too easy, to just be sniping from a distance as opposed to approaching all people, no matter their sexuality, as human beings who live normal lives. Treating your characters with love is a more interesting and exciting choice than choosing to be removed from them.”
Now in Los Angeles lending her upbeat and inclusive sensibility to the writer’s room for Disney XD’s Big Hero 6, she’s come full circle after claiming ownership of her struggles and finding her creative voice. She brings along a message she hopes to convey through her mental health advocacy—the message she wants to give her sixteen-year-old self: “You’re going to be OK. Not only is [life] going to be worth living, it’s going to be even cooler than you think.”
PHOTO BY SHARON ALAGNA
BREAKING
SUNITA MANI “I DID EVERYTHING I COULD,” says Sunita Mani of her formative years in Dickson, Tennessee. “I was on the dance team, I played soccer, I played basketball, I was on student council. I loved putting myself out there, I think to overcompensate for the fact that I was so different. We were the only Indian family in town. I tried to fit in with lots of groups because I kind of didn’t know where I fit in exactly.”
ethnicity, which was hard for me to understand. In the comedy and live performances I was doing, I felt so in control of how I was being defined, and then I walk into an audition and I was cast without a callback, and then I get to the costume fitting and I’m trying on hijabs. “All in all, it was a very interesting learning experience,” Mani says of her early days on the show, noting that the Mr. Robot team is very secretive; she’s never quite sure what her character’s next move is until it’s about to happen. “I’m so grateful they wanted me for the role. It’s totally outside of my comfort zone. It’s such a cool, convention-breaking show.”
Turns out the answer was “everywhere.” Mani earned a BFA in writing, literature, and publishing from Emerson College in 2008. She then moved to New York and studied improv at the Upright Citizens Brigade. Standup is about 180 degrees away from the comfort zone of many writers, so how did Mani go from observer to performer? “Academia at Emerson was so loose,” she says. “I realized kind of early on that I wasn’t going to get much out of it, so I poured myself into the extracurriculars. I was so in love with the comedy scene.” As Mani explored more and more, formal writing slid to the bottom of her list of priorities. “I couldn’t sit down and focus on it. I was too distracted and excited by the performances I was doing and the friendships I was making.” BACKSTORY: A jane-of-all-trades (and master of all, too) shaking
Mani was then cast in Netflix’s GLOW, based on the real-life Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling—professional women wrestlers of the ’80s and ’90s whose personas in the ring played up all sorts of stereotypes. Mani plays Arthie Premkumar, an Indian-American med student who is hired to wrestle as an Arab caricature, Beirut the Mad Bomber. Just like Arthie before her first performance, Mani was, understandably, nervous about the role. “It’s been really challenging in all the right ways,” she says. “I was terrified, but I definitely had an open door with the writers, who were so receptive, so thoughtful, so smart. They’re taking care of fourteen different women with totally different perspectives and making them dynamic and dimensional.”
Mani can dance, too: classical South Indian, up preconceptions of what it means to be an entertainer in 2017 jazz, clogging, you name it. “I loved song FROM: Born and raised in Tennessee, graduated from Emerson College in Boston, and now based in New York and dance [when I was a kid],” she says. YOU MIGHT KNOW HER FROM: Her role as fsociety hacker Trenton “I felt like I was making people feel good. on USA’s Mr. Robot I really absorbed a lot of other people’s NOW: She’s in the ring as Arthie Premkumar/Beirut the Mad energy. I still do.” Since 2009, she’s been Bomber on the Netflix series GLOW, which was recently renewed for a second season one-third of Cocoon Central Dance Team, a dance-comedy act that’s been featured on Broad City Live. Mani put those skills to exemplary use in the wacked-out While Mani has, true to her claim, seemingly done everything—including stiltvideo for DJ Snake and Lil Jon’s “Turn Down for What,” which blew up when walking in a parade as part of a clown company and performing country music it was released in 2013 and is creeping up on three quarters of a billion on a monthly live radio show à la A Prairie Home Companion that wasn’t actually views on YouTube. broadcast anywhere—there’s still at least one more thing on her creative todo list. “I really would like to make a dance movie. I love choreography so Her first major acting role was as Trenton, a hacker with the fsociety on much,” she says. “I’m a huge Pina Bausch fan. It excites me always.” It’s clear the USA drama Mr. Robot. “It was a role I was cast in, I felt, because of my that when Mani is excited about something, good things follow. Stay tuned.
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BY LYDIA PUDZIANOWSKI
PHOTO BY CATE HELLMAN
BREAKING
SINZIANA VELICESCU NOT MUCH IN THE HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY HAS BEEN INTERNALIZED BY THE AMERICAN PSYCHE—there’s no Gutenberg, or Edison, or Lumière being spoonfed into school curriculums and quiz shows. This is peculiar considering how ubiquitous the medium is: Instagram is now the second most popular social network (behind Facebook), and, notably, the fastest growing network for advertisers due to its engagement. It’s the first thing many people look at when they wake up in the morning, and that level of use has created an unprecedented culture of support and interest in the fine art world—and also an unprecedented number of selfies, too. Sinziana Velicescu isn’t in the selfie-posting business. In fact, in her recent rise to prominence—which has been particularly meteoric online—she hasn’t even tended to post pictures of people at all. “I just personally don’t have any interest in photographing human faces for some reason,” she says, meeting over coffee in the face-heavy Los Feliz neighborhood of her native Los Angeles. “I just don’t have this connection.” Working under the moniker @casualtimetravel, Velicescu is less interested in people and more interested in the objects that people create (and often neglect): buildings, cars, signs, lampposts. These objects are frequently framed in a way that’s intensely blunt and slightly askew, pastel layers toppling amongst each other, held stable by impossibly pure skylines and alien pavements.
toward that because it’s colorful and it’s bright and it’s punchy and it’s not boring like classical paintings of angels and shit,” she laughs. “I feel like that’s partially why I’m still drawn to that kind of stuff. You don’t have to think about it; you’re just drawn to it and you don’t really know why.” While she talks, Velicescu’s eyes don’t wander to the world going by—she’s not constantly looking for her next shot. “I don’t really do that street photography thing,” she says. Just in case, she keeps a couple of cameras in her car (her go-to is a Mamiya 6, for the gearheads out there), but for the most part, her photos come from blocks of time set aside for the task of exploring a specific spot, mostly within the greater Los Angeles area, which provides the work with a placid, sunbleached quality.
BACKSTORY: A self-taught photographer painting a conceptual picture of a concept-free world FROM: Los Angeles, California YOU MIGHT KNOW HER FROM: Instagram, under the handle @casualtimetravel
“I literally take a day each weekend—or two days—and I go out for like four hours by myself,” she explains. “I’ll set a destination— ‘I’m going to start here and I’ll end up here’— and then walk back, or take a Lyft back if I get too far. It’s mostly a lonely thing; I don’t want to do it around other people. It’s very meditative... Like, I’ll go with my boyfriend and he’ll be like, ‘Why’re we in this weird parking lot?’”
NOW: Releasing a book of her series called On the Periphery via Aint-Bad
“I like to isolate certain things and abstract them,” she says, acknowledging that, while photographers like Lewis Baltz and Joel Sternfeld serve as inspiration, her style is more informed by abstract expressionist painters than by modern photographers. She remembers a childhood filled with LACMA visits, during which she would plop herself down in the modern arts section (“Here’s a black square and here’s a white square—I loved that”), taking in Color Field artists like Mark Rothko and Frank Stella. “As a kid, you gravitate
And to be sure, parking lots are central to the @casualtimetravel experience—as are alleys, garages, motels, and any other place where your first instinct might be to immediately leave and not look back. Places that people are responsible for, but for which they feel no responsibility anymore. “I feel like the act of [photography] is sort of like a detective thing,” she says. “Discovering little details about a place, trying to piece a history of something together based on what’s there now and what could’ve been there before.” Hence the name “Casual Time Travel.” Walking around a dilapidated Lancaster mall isn’t exactly transporting to the signing of the Declaration of Independence. But it is toeing into a history that’s just as real.
BY NATE ROGERS PORTRAIT PHOTO BY MARK ESCRIBANO ALL OTHER PHOTOS BY SINZIANA VELICESCU 20
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www.wilcoworld.net 2017 Rhino Entertainment, a Warner Music Company.
Is Everything Awesome? A Philosophical Inquiry with Nick Riggle
by Marty Sartini Garner
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On Being Awesome: A Unified Theory of How Not to
Is this book descriptive or prescriptive? In other
built around the idea of creating those social
Suck does something you might expect, given its
words, do we already tend to use “awesome”
openings. Can you explain that a bit further?
title: It doesn’t suck.
to mean one particular thing, or are you using
That’s a technical term. While it appears on the
the term to describe an otherwise-unnamed
We’re often governed by a range of—hopefully—
phenomenon?
useful social roles and norms that structure our
surface to be a work of what we might call novelty
daily lives. When we engage in these roles, we’re a
semantics—“Oh, haha, I guess that is what we mean
It’s actually a little of both—it’s what we call a
kind of generic person, and there’s nothing wrong
when we say ‘awesome’”—author Nick Riggle quickly
constructive theory. It’s supposed to describe the
with that. When you order a coffee, you and I are
and convincingly makes the case for the pursuit of
use of a word in a way that captures the value that
basically the same person: We say the same things,
awesomeness (and the avoidance of suckiness, its
it has. I make a point in the book of saying that we
we’re polite in more or less the same ways. Nothing
mortal enemy) as a legitimate social aim.
use the words “awesome” and “sucks” in a variety
about our individuality shines forth. Society needs
of ways, and sometimes we just need to say, “That’s
those things; they’re important for society to move
Yes, Riggle teaches in San Diego, brah, and yes, he
awesome, I like it,” and it’s not any deeper than that.
along efficiently.
is a former professional inline skater who made
But if that’s all there was to the term, it wouldn’t be
appearances at three consecutive X Games, but
worth writing a book about it. As I looked into it
But we create a social opening when we break out
“awesome,” as he defines it, doesn’t delineate
more and more, and started to construct this idea
of those roles and express our individuality to
someone who’s developed a chilled-out personal
that awesomeness and suckiness have this more
someone who’s also just enacting a role. When you
brand. “Chill,” in fact, is a form of awesomeness
profound social meaning, I began to think that it
do that, you enable them to break out of their role
of dubious worth, and brand-building in this
was worth figuring out what that was exactly and
and express their individuality. A social opening
telling runs counter to truly awesome work: To
seeing if there was anything more to it.
occurs when someone breaks out of their habits in
be awesome is to pursue “an ethics that governs
a way that expresses who they are as an individual,
the expression and mutual appreciation of
Louis C.K. says that we’re wasting all of our
but that also allows the person they’re interacting
individuality,” as he puts it.
highest words on things that don’t matter—that
with to express themselves; [social openings are]
if we say that our chicken wings are “amazing,”
successful when there’s a mutual appreciation of
Put differently, an awesome person is someone who
we don’t have any words left to describe the birth
individuality.
pushes against outdated or unquestioned norms—
of our children. Given its origin, is it fair to use
whether aesthetic, moral, athletic, or whatever—
the word “awesome” to describe things that don’t
Whether something is “awesome” or “sucks,” you
while also opening space for people who are not
literally inspire awe?
say, is not synonymous with it being moral or immoral. Is awesomeness the only lens through
like them to do the very same. It’s about looking at
which we should see the world?
our social interactions the way a couple of skaters
I think it’s totally fair, and it’s not arbitrary. It’s
might see an office park: as a place for mutual play.
actually a natural use of the word “awesome,”
In a pluralistic world that fractures further by the
insofar as awe-inspiring things—“awesome” in the
I don’t think it’s the only lens—I think it’s the icing
minute, being awesome might be the only viable
traditional sense—motivate us or inspire us to do
on the cake. Awesomeness is a system of evaluation
model for the future of our society.
awesome things in the new sense. There’s some
that thrives when we have a culture that’s peaceful,
interesting research out there that shows that
egalitarian, and respectful. We need these norms of
It’s a complex argument that takes us from
when we experience awe, we’re moved to create
morality to structure our interactions at the ground
the worlds of street art, political activism, and
social connections; we want to tell people about
level. It’s only when that’s sufficiently secure that
community building to professional figure skating,
the awesome thing we saw, we want to share the
we can enact the ethics of awesomeness. In other
the origin of the high five, and the question of
album that we heard. It’s a motive to create social
words, we have to treat each other as persons before
whether Grizzly Bear is more awesome than Pete
openings. Awe inspires us to be awesome.
we can treat each other as individuals. To extend the
Seeger. So we called up Riggle to ask for some clarification.
metaphor, what’s a cake without icing? You can still The crux of your argument for awesomeness is
eat it, but it’s dry and not as good as it could be.
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Is awesomeness universal? Can we all agree that a certain action is awesome, or is it in the eye of the beholder? Whether someone is really creating a social opening
IS IT AWESOME, OR DOES IT SUCK? Awesomeness theory applied.
can vary from individual to individual. If I’m a vegan and someone offers me venison jerky that they made themselves, there’s something appreciable
Dylan going electric.
Quoting Austin Powers.
be careful about who you’re speaking with, what the
My take on it is that it was in general an awesome thing to
I would love it if someone quoted
circumstances are, and in some cases you already
do, but he did it in a sucky way. He was slightly disdainful
Austin Powers, but I can imagine lots
have to know something about the individual.
toward the fans that loved him—his folk fans. And to do
of people who would have legitimate
it in a dismissive, “I’m a badass”/cool-guy way… It’s on the
reasons for not loving that. It was
asshole-y side of things.
wack by 2000, for sure.
about it, but I’m a vegan; that’s insensitive! So it varies depending on taste and style. The art of creating social openings is a subtle art. You have to
It seems like awesomeness practiced at a higher level would mend the fissures in our society without our having to sacrifice the gains we’ve made as individuals in the past sixty-ish years. That
People who say “awesome sauce.”
seems suddenly to be incredibly important, given
There are certain phrases that stick in your side, and that’s definitely one of them. I wouldn’t generalize
that certain forces are trying to re-homogenize our
about people who use the phrase, but the phrase itself sucks. Although there’s this guy who makes
society. To what extent is awesomeness the cure for
Awesome Sauce, and I kinda love that. Playful uses I like, but sincere uses, no.
white supremacy?
Guy Fieri.
it is fear of the unknown… Probably a lot of it’s
Taylor Swift’s album rollout.
racist, and homophobic, and transphobic, and just
I think she’s just wasting her time and it’s not
suckiness. But, I wanna say he’s kinda awesome
sucky and shitty. Recently we’ve seen a lot of this
interesting to focus these musical efforts on
in spite of his style. He goes around and sheds
value coalescing, where people are structuring
celebrity beefs. It feels very Trump-ian to me.
a positive light on a lot of these homespun
their lives around certain values and seeking others
I’d rather hear a really good Taylor Swift song
restaurants that are doing awesome things:
who are doing the exact same: white supremacy,
and not her singing about reputation battles
They’re
et cetera. It’s the same thing you see with cults,
she’s in with other celebrities.
innovative and outlandish forms of cuisine.
There’s been a lot of pushback against the cultural revolution of the ’60s. Some of it’s racist, some of
[Sighs.] I guess I’m on record saying this. His style’s kinda wack, and wackness is a form of
bringing
people
together
around
creating a sense of individuality by forming groups around that sense of individuality and seeming to
because you distort your openness to other forms
Donald Trump’s dismantling of political norms.
of individuality. Awesomeness is about cultivating
Very, very sucky. These are important norms to keep in place so we can maintain a society of mutual
a baseline down-ness, being down to explore your
respect and peace and kindness—the kind of society that allows awesomeness to flourish. He’s doing
individuality with other people. So the ethics
all he can to dismantle that and create a much suckier world.
enhance its value by amplifying the sense of group cohesion. That really sucks, technically speaking,
of awesomeness runs counter to a lot of strong currents in culture right now. 26
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JOSHUA TREE, SPRING 2017
Signs of humanity in the desert—barebones homestead cabins, eccentric religious monuments, art that’s too raw for a gallery or museum—are inherently odd. Even the seemingly normal things, like gas stations and franchise stores, are made abnormal by the passage of time there—warped and bleached by the sun and forever sticking out, never assimilating. That’s because the desert is hostile to human endeavor. In cities, people have shaped the land to suit their needs, but in the desert, it’s the other way around. I imagine the desert was much the same before humans arrived on the scene, and will remain so once we’ve departed, save perhaps for the odd leftover mannequin head or plaster apostle arm—strange relics for our alien or cyborg successors to puzzle over.
PHOTOS AND TEXT BY ANDREW VAN BAAL
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RING CYCLE (KISSING TO BE CLEVER), 2013
SAGE VAUGHN GETS REAL
BY ALAN SARTIRANA IMAGES COURTESY OF SAGE VAUGHN FLOOD
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Sage Vaughn was born to a pair of hippies who raised him in Oregon, and later in Los Angeles, the land where the real meets the surreal on a daily basis. Unsurprisingly, the artist—who makes his home in a thriving LA art scene—is constantly exploring the relationship between the world we see and the world we intuit. As a result, his work challenges the way we perceive the spaces that we live in. Like a paintsmudged Alice falling through the rabbit hole into Wonderland, he illuminates bizarre dreamscapes, places that feel like a kind of hypercolor cousin to our own increasingly bleak reality. FLOOD caught up with Vaughn at his studio on a bright, clear day to help us find our place in the cosmos. He guided us through his eclectic style and approach, the role surfing plays in his work, and his collaborative work with FLOOD 3 cover artist Michael Muller.
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PREVIOUS SPREAD: NIGHT GARDEN, 2016 | THIS PAGE: CULTURE CLUB, 2017
“Surfing is far more creative than making art.”
ECLIPSE, 2013
Do you feel like you consciously make the juxtaposition between the real and the surreal when you’re painting a subject? Or is that something that just comes out of it as you develop a subject?
United States]. But then when Shepard Fairey did the piece for Obama, the power behind that was incredible. So I really kinda changed my feelings about it.
Well, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. When I first started painting birds, I was just somehow drawn to them. I don’t have any particular affinity toward birds at all, and then I would look back at the work that I did and see, “Oh, it’s mainly these really commonplace birds”; I’m not painting, like, macaws or anything. And then I started looking at these little glimpses of wildlife within our everyday settings, and that started to kind of echo feelings I had about control and chaos and how hard that is to balance.
I don’t know if my artwork is the most appropriate [way] to address a lot of the political stuff that’s going on right now, [though]. There are a couple of dudes out there that I really respect who are approaching that kind of conversation. As an artist, you’re already making work to be criticized. Then you take it to that level of political discourse, and you’re just like, “Wow.” Those are tough dudes; those are like prizefighter artists.
Speaking of chaos, how do you think the current political climate plays a role in your work? I oscillate a lot between whether politics is [or is] not the business of artists. In the South American revolutions in the ’60s, there were poets being put to death because of how powerfully their message was lending itself to the movement. And music and stuff was all part of those revolutions, too. I really felt like art didn’t have a part in politics [in the
You’re an avid surfer and have collaborated with various others who love the water and ocean life. Many surfers say they feel a greater connection to nature and awareness of the world around them. Do you feel that same connection, and do you feel it has an impact on your work? It’s funny, all the surf paintings I’ve ever done I’ve always just kept for myself; I don’t really like showing those. I think maybe some things have subliminally changed since I started surfing about ten years ago. Most importantly, I just feel like that practice informs my art. It balances
things a little bit better. Every day, for the past ten years, [I’ve been] in this room, looking at surfaces close to my face. It’s nice to start the morning looking at the horizon. Surfing is far more creative than making art. Like, when I watch certain surfers, it’s like the most intuitively creative [movement]—aside from certain kinds of dance—that I’ve ever seen. It’s just instinctual reactions on this flowing [body of water]. And then it’s gone. Photography plays a huge role in your work, too. What is it about bringing together your painting and real-life images that’s so interesting to you? When I was painting photo-realistic backgrounds, I just wanted to be able to get as close to a specific [scene] as I could. I would paint these out-of-focus, black-and-whitish–style backgrounds of cities, because I really wanted to give people the feeling of a dream of a city, rather than an illustration of a city. The subjects—the butterflies and the birds— were so specific and illustrative that I wanted the idea of a setting, as opposed to “New York City” or whatever.
I’ve been doing these Great White shark photos and I’m gonna have all these other artists paint on them.” He sent me one, and I just had an idea—like, I saw it finished before it had even started. He had already done so much of the work that I could just kind of [do my thing]. Most of my paintings take a long time, so this was a nice one. He didn’t do too many other collaborations after that, which I felt pretty cocky about afterwards [laughs]. You’ve also collaborated and shown work with surfer Rob Machado. How did that process differ? That was a cumulative process. Rob was shaping surfboards, and I said to him something about how I should paint on one of those. He shaped a board for his wife and one for me and one for himself, and I painted on [all three]. Then I told him that we should do a show of these, because they came out pretty good right from the beginning. So we did a show and ran it through his charity. I like his charity; it’s a really reasonable charity and really focused. It’s really simple—[they’re like,] “We’re making money to pick trash up off of beaches,” so it was easy to do. Are there any big projects you’re working on that you’re excited about?
And that just kind of worked. Luckily, it’s worked out pretty well with the guys I’ve collaborated with. But it’s a funny [mode of] collaboration. Like working with Michael Muller, I know that dude shoots huge campaigns where there’s so many people in the room with him as he’s clicking and taking, like, fifteen-hundred shots with the agents and everyone there. And then we work on something together, and I’m like, “Dude, you realize it’s just me in a room making all the decisions?” And we just make one picture when it’s done. It’s such a different balance.
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You’ve been working with Muller for five or six years. How did those collaborations come about?
I just did a bunch of paintings, like big mural pieces, at the Annapurna Pictures production offices, which was great because that area they own has a really amazing artistic history. It was [first the home of] these silent film actresses that then made the first female film studio, and then it was the Margo Leavin Gallery, which was a super-rad gallery run by a rad lady that showed all the top-notch artists, but in this really laid-back setting. LA was not the fuckin’ center of the art world for so long, and she would do a David Hockney show there [when no one else would]. So the place has a lot of good history, and I was stoked that they asked me to do something there.
We were surfing together with a mutual friend, and my friend was like, “Have you ever seen Mike’s shark photos?” And Mike was like, “Yeah,
I’m also doing something with the University of Oregon—these big sculptures at this new stadium they built. It’s a cool public art piece that
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IN THE ROUGH, 2017
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STONED OWL, 2013
COLLABORATION WITH MICHAEL MULLER, 2017
is really far out of my comfort zone in terms of what I’m good at doing— by that I mean the logistics of it are something I’m not good at doing. The art’s gonna be good! But the rest of it, well… I’m definitely working with people who are incredibly patient and nice to me. There’s often a misconception that artists lack discipline, but you are extremely prolific. Describe what your principal motivators are and where you think your strong work ethic comes from. I love the doing, I love the making. I love the—well, I don’t like the end result. I don’t want to own anything really, just the making of it is what I love. It’s really selfish, but I’ve somehow managed to make my life into the thing where I just get to keep doing that part that I like. So I [just kind of] ended up with this work ethic. I mean, I think I was also avoiding a lot of weird deep personal shit by just locking myself away in my studio for a number of years [laughs]. But it worked! How do you see your own art evolving over time and with age? I think it’s gettin’ weirder. I didn’t expect it to. There are certain weird tropes that artists have that I’ve always tried my hardest to avoid. It’s
like becoming your parents: You’re working so hard to not become just like your parents, and then you go this whole around-the-world way to being just like your dad. You’re like, “Oh, fuck. I was avoiding that one thing he does, and I came around here and did all these fifty other things that he does.” There are certain artists that I’ve seen… It’s hard to describe, but artists don’t get tighter and tighter as they get older. They tend to find essence. Instead of boiling things down, they loosen things up, they become less finicky. You look at Jasper Johns, and over his career, toward the end— not the end, but the later years—it’s just getting less and less finicky and less and less tight. I find myself doing that, but by millimeters, where I’m not spending as much time fussing over things, and it’s nice. So I think it’s gonna get pretty loose and messy in the end. But you’re comfortable with that. Yes. I mean, I’m working on it. I think the thing is me getting comfortable with it, if that makes sense. I could paint the same painting now that I’ll probably paint in fifty years, but I wouldn’t like it now. Fifty years from now, I’ll be like, “No, that’s what it is.” [Laughs.]
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“I could paint the same painting now that I’ll probably paint in fifty years, but I wouldn’t like it now.”
You’ve travelled the world showing your work, including stints in Europe and China. Is there anywhere you would love to go to work?
If you had to compare your overall body of work to one album, what would it be?
There are a couple of weird spots in the world I’ve never been to that I feel like would be good places to make work, and I don’t know why. I have all these things—rules, invisible rules—inside of me that I gave myself about how to make work. I’ll be painting something, and I’ll be like, “That’s not the right color.” But then I went to Mexico, and I went surfing, and I was going through the jungle and looking at some of the colors in the leaves there, and I thought, “So you could do that. You can do red, yellow, and green in the leaf. That’s totally cool.”
I’ll just go with my first thing that comes to mind: Money Mark’s first album, Mark’s Keyboard Repair. I’ve always wanted to be part of some art movement or piece with a clique of other artists, but looking back, I never was. And I think Mark’s first album was like that, where it was just a fucking beauty, an amazing thing that just stood outside of everything.
So I think certain places would allow me to give myself permission to do certain things that I think would be good. It’s usually the surf travel that gives me more inspiration. The art travels are always to a place that’s not inspiring—London or Geneva, or some place that you think, “It’s cool to be here, it’s awesome, but it’s not making me want to work.” But then I go to, like, Costa Rica, and I’m like, “Oh, yeah, that’s fuckin’ weird, we should paint things that look like that.”
There’s a lot of cool shit going on right now, a lot of younger dudes and ladies making work with a kind of courage that wasn’t happening when I first started. There weren’t that many dudes making art in LA when I started making art. I wasn’t ahead of the curve or anything; it just wasn’t a thing then. Now I think it’s been kind of formulaic for long enough and there’s a bunch of people doing some pretty far-out stuff that’s very different.
Let’s talk about music. What do you typically listen to when you work? And does that differ from what you’re listening to when you’re not working?
My friend Thomas Lynch does these amazing, super-trippy paintings that are gorgeous. He’s going for it in a big way—a very specific, airbrushed, surfy skeleton galactic kinda way. It’s making me really recognize how beautiful that stuff is. And his brother, Brendan, is doing these cool, like, Dungeons & Dragons style paintings that you’re like, “Oh, yeah, I kinda love that stuff. Oh, fuck, you’re totally making me realize how rad dragons are!” [Laughs.]
I think I’ve listened to everything. I’ve spent so much time in the studio just listening to music [laughs]. I don’t think I’ve really listened to music in here in a long time, though. Now I mainly listen to podcasts and books on tape. To be honest, music-wise, I’ve listened to nothing but Steely Dan for the past three months. Like, a lot of it. [Editor’s note: This interview was conducted before Steely Dan’s Walter Becker passed away.]
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Who are some up-and-coming LA artists that you’re a fan of?
Famous last words? “Dangit.” Oh, or, “I should have probably thought about this.” That should be my famous last words.
STUCK WITH A VALUBLE FRIEND, 2012
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by A.D. Amorosi photos courtesy of Abso Lutely Productions 56
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“You know— late-night public access, industrial films, floppy-disc file art, that stuff.”
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t’s as humid inside Philadelphia’s grand, hundred-year-old Merriam Theater as it is outside, with a level of discomfort bordering on distressed casting a pall over the audience. It would be no surprise if all air conditioning was turned off on purpose just for effect. Such cheap tricks, low-level anxiety, and psychic dissonance is a perfect state in which to watch Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim ply their brand of uncomfortable avantgarde humor in live celebration of the tenth anniversary of Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!
I
Empty pauses, offensive PSAs delivered by reps from a fake college (Dobis U.?), a grouchy German techno-rock band called Zwei Dunkel Jungen playing “Mini Van Highway,” underwear-only routines—on stage, all these elements get wild laughs, but they go on too long to stay funny; staying funny is not necessarily Heidecker and Wareheim’s thing. The longer they sit with a joke, the more it shifts between funny and not, entertaining and bothersome, until they reach something like the sublime. Such unsentimental abstraction is what has defined the duo since they first came together. “You know—late-night public access, industrial films, floppy-disc file art, that stuff,” says Heidecker quietly of what defines their aesthetic, at least until the first season of their spookily weird Tim & Eric’s Bedtime Stories, another of the
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pair’s Adult Swim series (the second season of which is airing this fall), which finds them pursuing their dark vision in glossy HD. “Eric had been trying to get me to do something Awesome Show again for a while, and I’ve really been thinking about its legacy; we did that already and [it] ended strong, so maybe we should put a period on it,” says Heidecker, who has also been busy with the CIA spoof show Decker for Adult Swim (not to mention having released a Harry Nilsson–inspired album last year). “Then Eric reminded me that Awesome Show was really fun and that it made sense to celebrate with our fans because of the anniversary.” Despite his apparent enthusiasm, Wareheim, who appears in Master of None with Aziz Ansari, says that he was more apprehensive about returning to Awesome Show as well, as both he and Wareheim had moved past its odd characters in search of odder characters. “But we started slamming on day one of this tour’s rehearsals,” says Wareheim. “Banged the whole thing out in a month.” So how did a pair of students from Philly’s Temple University, who began with small, lo-tech sketch-comedy films, come to make one of the weirdest, most awkward— and most acclaimed—comedy series of the past decade? And how did they form a partnership that drew the immediate attention of Bob Odenkirk and came to feature diverse Hollywood names such as Jeff Goldblum, Ben Stiller, Fred Armisen, Karen
Black, Frank Black, Maria Bamford, Paul Reubens, Rob Zombie, and John C. Reilly, whose Dr. Steve Brule character became its own doubly-disturbing Adult Swim spinoff? (“Paul Rudd says every time that he sees me that he’s proud to still get called ‘Celery Man’ by our fans,” says Heidecker of Rudd’s classic Tim and Eric character.) There is no origin story for Awesome Show, Great Job! without Tom Goes to the Mayor, a necessarily cheap (“That’s what we could afford,” says Wareheim) cut-and-paste animated show with live-action elements. That project caught the attention of a post–Mr. Show Odenkirk when Heidecker and Wareheim mailed him a package of their videos. “The humor element—the thing that drove Tim and I together—is almost a supernatural phenomenon,” says Heidecker, talking about a shared comic aesthetic as if he were talking about a romance. The lo-fi vibe was the fruit of the two of them applying a rudimentary approach to their ideas. They weren’t editors. Video-making was primordial. Their software was bad. “We didn’t know actors, so we were the actors; didn’t know how to make animation but couldn’t afford to pay someone. It was our spirit, the whole DIY, can-do nature of who we are,” says Wareheim. “That’s what comes through in stuff like Tom and Awesome Show. That’s us coming from Philly and hustling.”
Odenkirk loved their videos and began mentoring the pair, eventually jumping on board to help produce and develop a show. While Heidecker moved to New York, Wareheim held down the fort in Philadelphia until a buyer came through: Adult Swim. “We just went for it and up-and-moved to California as soon as Adult Swim made a small offer for our pilot, trusting that Bob would help us put it together,” Wareheim says. It was a huge risk, but Heidecker and Wareheim were ready to gamble on that opportunity. “Adult Swim liked the sketchcharacter stuff on our video, but they thought Tom Goes to the Mayor was stronger,” says Wareheim. “Nothing we did was Hollywood,” he adds. “Odenkirk and [Adult Swim creative director Mike] Lazzo had been around the block and they weren’t looking to see more of the same, the boring, the usual, the obvious. To them, we were different.” Lazzo and Odenkirk were so pleased with the difference (as were fans such as David Cross and Jack Black, who made appearances and talked the duo up to their friends) that when Tom Goes to the Mayor came and went after only two seasons, no one fretted. It was simply time for Heidecker and Wareheim to stretch and show off their strongest suit. “We made stuff on the Internet and performed live in LA on the side while we were making Tom so that when it ended,
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we wanted to do a sketch show next,” says Wareheim. “They wanted us to keep swinging the bat,” Heidecker adds. “There were things we were writing and conceiving that had this Channel 5 KTLA UHF feel, but we weren’t motivated to make things look randomly bad,” says Heidecker. “Awesome Show was not [about] how bad anything looks or we look. It’s a feeling. If we were doing a Cinco commercial [for the blandly ubiquitous fictional corporate brand that sells everything from Food Tubes to Privacy Helmets to B’Owl—a combination bat and owl], it couldn’t be randomly bad. It had to be the look that served the idea the strongest.” Usually that meant the cable access vibe that served everything from appearances from actor Tairy Greene (Zach Galifianakis) to “Child Showcase” participant Joshua Beard (Patton Oswalt). “It was nice having somebody established like Bob [Odenkirk] who could call in favors, vouch for you, be a part of what you’re doing—not just to bring in another comic’s audience, but to signal that we were OK, and that our shows were cool to do,” notes Heidecker. “This was before YouTube exploded, so you exposed yourself however you could on the Internet and different pockets of people aligned with you for cool cred.” Wareheim laughs about offering stars such as Jeff Goldblum “not a lot of money” to come to Hollywood for an hour and goof off in their studio. “People were happy to
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do it, plus we gave them control so that they could develop their own characters,” he says. “Then after a time, people would call us to come in.”
of our characters. If they got the least bit popular we would kill them off; that’s just how we were. By the fifth season it became ‘What else can we do with this format?’”
The one man who really helped turn that tide was “Weird Al” Yankovic, who, as a fan of the pair, sought them out to work on a character away from his usual. “We were floored and flipping out since we had grown up with [his work],” says Wareheim. “It’s funny. We’ve been in the biz for like twelve years and people ask us to be on their shows all the time, which is great. But it’s a thirteen-hour commitment at least, considering fittings and stuff. Now, imagine Awesome Show, where we asked people to come in for an hour and improvise. That’s a dream gig.”
Which brings us to Tim & Eric’s Bedtime Stories, an anthology horror/comedy series, the pilot of which aired on Halloween 2013. The slightly longer–form Bedtime Stories is more visually arresting and cinematic than Awesome Show—and even, in a fashion, more accessible. “We have the money to play with,” Heidecker says of the show’s production value. “Still, it has to have our voice.”
It’s when the pair got to season five that things started to get even weirder, more uncomfortable, darker. Most notably, the season featured a notorious “Dream Cream” sequence with the goo-slathered barbecued meat enthusiast Pierre (Ron Austar), who hand-feeds a child rancid hot dogs. The scene made the child actor’s parents so uncomfortable that he ended up being replaced with CGI. “I think that it was just that we are not programmed for the normal TV business,” says Wareheim of him and Heidecker getting bored with themselves and cranky by season five. “You know, do the show, get the good characters, repeat the same stories over and over so we can syndicate it. We never had that in our blood. We got sick
Of course it does; nobody else tells stories about relationship scenarios verging on sci-fi with offbeat and slightly otherdimensional worlds that are familiar, but not. Heidecker points to Bedtime Stories episode “Toes,” where people get their toes cut off, or “The Bathroom Boys,” where two men are stuck living in a public lavatory. “That is very much our voice, even connected to something such as Tom Goes to the Mayor where everything is surreal but manageable. In Bedtime Stories, we want you to accept this as reality.” Wareheim goes a little deeper by admitting that Bedroom Stories is filled with nightmares that the pair fear most: a world where a man is obsessed by the singing of a teenage boy, or one where a character’s wife and neighbor want to bury him alive. “The overarching theme is like, the worst things that Tim and I can imagine in the real world,” he says.
“Things that are genuine nightmares to us— addiction, anxiety, depression, human faults. Like a man who would prefer being taken care of as a son rather than as a husband,” says Heidecker about one of Bedtime Stories’ newest tales. “It’s silly and it’s sad. [It’s] about how grown-ups just don’t want responsibility,” he adds. “These are the things we want to talk about now.” Growing up. Adult fears. That’s a far cry from what they wanted to discuss during the awkward stares and cheap visual semantics of Awesome Show, Great Job! ten years ago. Then again, maybe it’s not, considering the uncomfortable humor of getting one’s toes cut off or of being trapped in a bathroom forever. “Either way, it’s very clear that Awesome Show, Great Job! will be the best thing we ever do— that will be the perception, not by us, but by a large part of the public,” says Heidecker. “And that’s cool. It ate up the biggest part of our most creatively fertile period. Not to compare us to grapes, but you make the wine at a very young period and just hope it has legs, and everything else comes from that yield. I don’t think that we’ll ever be as motivated, hungry, and fearless as we were ten years ago. Then again, I could be wrong. No matter what, it’s Awesome Show, Great Job! that will be mentioned first in my obituary.”
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BIAS BY NUMBERS, 2017
OBEDIENCE AND HOPE:
Shepard Fairey’s Way Up by Kyle MacKinnel
images courtesy of Shepard Fairey
As he prepares for one of his largest-ever solo shows, the street art icon reflects on how he got here.
HE’D BEEN EYEING THE BARE CONCRETE SURFACE FOR QUITE SOME TIME. AS ALWAYS, IT STARED AHEAD WITH STATIC INDIFFERENCE, EIGHT STORIES ABOVE THE BUSTLING LOWER EAST SIDE INTERSECTION OF HOUSTON AND BROADWAY, TO THE SOUTHEAST OF WASHINGTON SQUARE. HE KNEW THAT MANY THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD BUZZED THROUGH THE CROSSROADS EACH DAY. THE WINDOWLESS WALL SAT IN PLAIN VIEW TO THE MASSES, SCREAMING OUT SILENTLY TO BE SLAMMED, AND HE HEARD IT LOUD AND CLEAR. IT WOULDN’T BE HIS FIRST ATTEMPT. MANY FLIGHTS OF STAIRS HAD ALREADY BEEN CLIMBED, SEVERAL ELEVATORS RIDDEN, EACH PATHWAY ULTIMATELY LEADING TO A SECURELY LOCKED DOOR AND PATRONIZING "ROOF ACCESS" SIGN. FLOOD
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NO FUTURE, 2017
One day, after visiting the office of a magazine in the same building, the young man noticed an open door he hadn’t seen before. He and his cousin packed up their cans and rollers in an inconspicuous fashion and dressed to resemble maintenance workers. He knew they had to act fast before the building was secured for the night. Their final obstacle would be the security guard in the lobby. He walked up to the desk coolly and explained that they were there to perform maintenance in said magazine office, knowing full well that if the guard called upstairs for verification they were screwed. But the guard didn’t call. Something oddly relatable in the eyes of this maintenance worker suggested he had a good reason for being there. Home free on the illicit rooftop, a thirty-year-old Shepard Fairey rolled out his signature piece: a stylized visage of the behemoth wrestler Andre the Giant, a sort of tangible proto-meme. “OBEY,” it instructed the passersby sardonically. Soon they would all be listening. His hair tousled by Manhattan wind tunnels, Fairey stood at the edge of the rooftop, on the precipice of a brand new millennium. It was the year 2000. He still could see two towers standing tall just a few blocks away, glistening in the synthetic aurora of New York City light pollution. Y2K had come and gone, but the world as he knew it had yet to end. “There have been a lot of intense things,” Fairey says of his graffiti exploits almost two decades later. In November, he’ll debut new work at Damaged, his largest-ever solo show in LA. But he wasn’t always so established. “Running from the police, having vigilante citizens pull guns on me, shimmying up drainpipes. But that night was the most thrilling, in good and very bad ways. Afterward, we went across the street to look at it and each put up a couple of stickers. We were promptly arrested by an undercover vandal squad for the stickering. Then, at a later point, they noticed the huge poster many stories above the street, and I had to do some Houdini-like maneuvering to avoid being caught with further evidence that would’ve incriminated me.” The sleight of hand that Fairey pulled in order to save his work on that memorable evening would pale in comparison to the personal and professional transformation he would achieve in the coming years. He had already been stickering the Andre the Giant image since he was a student at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1989, and was well on his way to helping some of the bestknown brands in America use guerrilla tactics to their own marketing ends as a founding member of the firm BLK/MRKT. Fairey’s pursuit of the tipping point between public menace and icon of the street-art world continued post-9/11 with countless successful design campaigns, including album covers for Smashing Pumpkins and Led Zeppelin. In 2004, his personal synthesis of street and protest art honed its focus with a series of anti– Iraq War/George W. Bush posters created in lockstep with fellow artists Robbie
WAKE UP, 2017
DEFEND DIGNITY, 2017
GREATER THAN FEAR, 2017
“Your images have a profound effect on people, whether seen in a gallery or on a stop sign.”
— Senator Barack Obama (from a 2008 letter to Shepard Fairey) 68
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Conal and Mear One. This progression would lead Fairey to his most notable work to date: a stylized stencil portrait—not entirely unlike his Andre the Giant— in a gradient derived from the colors of the American flag depicting United States Senator and 2008 presidential candidate Barack Obama. Beneath his likeness in block sky-blue letters read one word: HOPE. The Obama poster would vault Fairey to international fame, and become one of the most celebrated and recognizable images in the history of American politics. As the visual centerpiece in chief campaign strategist David Axelrod’s orchestrations for Obama, Fairey’s creation would ultimately prove to be the catalyst for an overarching paradigm shift taking place in the business of political branding. He hadn’t exactly invented the wheel—campaign posters and slogans have been commonplace in the United States since John Quincy Adams debuted them in 1824—but with the advent of social media outlets and viral systems of communication, an elephantine sense of urgency surrounding the value of imagerelated content had gained momentum in Washington, for better or worse. “The visual is important, but possibly only as a facet of brand awareness,” says Fairey. “Unfortunately, brand awareness and popularity seem to move the needle more than strong ideas and integrity.” The other side of the aisle took firm notice of the trend, and eventually succumbed to the uber-brand in Donald Trump. The Republican Party’s outmoded ideology allowed for no more viable path to the presidency than that of a former reality TV star whose preternatural flare for overhyped business deals and incendiary outcry would triumph by the power of name recognition and consistent (if disgusting) self-imagery. “I have a lot of problems with the two-party system because it reduces and oversimplifies things; there definitely aren’t enough choices,” says Fairey. “I’d love to see other parties rise to viability. What I’m hoping is that the dark days we’re experiencing politically are as troubling as they should be for a huge number of people to see this as a wakeup call.” Despite the rising red tide, Fairey maintains a certain optimism with regard to the potential for modern branding with positive impact. “I think it’s possible to use imagery in ways that are very positive and not superficial,” he says. It’s a trait at the heart of Damaged. “My propaganda campaign—which is designed to encourage people to question propaganda— PROTECT EACH OTHER, 2017
is something that I do with a sensitivity to the visual language of our culture, but also a desire to encourage people to consume with discretion and basically question everything. When you look at how shrewd a lot of advertising, marketing, and political propaganda is, it would be foolish not to try to push back with some of the same techniques, but with a sense of moral responsibility.”
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One year removed from Obama’s first inauguration, the dynamism of Fairey’s career would be further sharpened by the release of Exit Through the Gift Shop, a film by the subversive street artist—and Fairey contemporary—Banksy. The film blurs lines between documentary and satire, and left critics scrabbling in vain at perceived factual inconsistencies, raising many questions surrounding the relationships of persona to identity and art to commerce. The story is told through the lens of Thierry Guetta, a.k.a. Mr. Brainwash, a French expatriate street artist living in Los Angeles, and it’s allegedly compiled from thousands of hours of footage dating back to the late ’80s and directed by Banksy himself. As one of the primary subjects of Guetta’s footage, Fairey—along with his exploits—serves as an instrumental narrative element in the film. In the years since the release of Exit Through the Gift Shop, the film’s themes have become increasingly nebulous—street artists now routinely make compromises in the name of business and seek manifold revenue streams in order to claim a beggar’s portion of the return on value represented by their work. Though his own star was made long ago, Fairey can relate to the inherent conundrum of what it means to be an artist in the digital age, when access is paramount and all is disposable. “It’s hard to find a balance between not being too in people’s face versus seeming out of step with our culture’s metabolism, where people are constantly looking for new images, messages, et cetera,” he says. “I’m working hard to balance quantity and quality, but I don’t think I’m exactly ubiquitous compared to a lot of things in pop culture. ” Though he concedes that young artists must learn to worship the dual-faced god, as it were, to maintain their sanity and survive such a volatile sociocultural landscape, he still believes in the power of the image to come out of nowhere and transmute that landscape in such a way that unearths and cultivates the virtues of autonomy and transparency. This was Fairey’s ultimate aim all those years ago when he finally managed to tag the building at Houston and Broadway. But the fight remains ongoing and the world is always changing. Whether in the physical or digital realm, political or economic sector, and everywhere in between, we will never run short of structures to overcome. Keep raging, keep hustling, keep on questioning everything. “I think the barriers between fine art, commercial art, and creative product are eroding quickly,” he says. “The powers that be in the elite world of fine art might not like it and may work very hard to maintain the gatekeeping mechanisms of that world, but I think a lot of people have already scaled the walls. I’ve scaled a few walls.”
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