Escapism is the Order of the Day

What a boring bollocksy bloody world we’ve been living in lately. Even when something mildly interesting happens, like the Occupy Wall Street protests in lower Manhattan, the corporate-controlled mass media deigns not to cover it, for obvious reasons. Casually fascist police or state brutality, one would think, is always worth a look, but apparently it’s only newsworthy now if the violence transpires in a far-off Arab country where protests are vaguely aligned with some notion of Western democratic freedom. Unfortunately, these protests often result in a perpetually unstable system of governance controlled by a murky military quasi-dictatorship with questionable ties to the international neoliberal financial order.

Meanwhile, the Smurf movie remains the world box office champion for the seventh week in a row, passing the half billion-dollar box office mark. Exactly what circle of hell are we living in?

Escapism, it seems, is the order of the day. To that end, I would not only like to direct your attention to the recent release of my movie, L.A. Zombie, on DVD from strandreleasing.com (this is the theatrical version; the hardcore porn version, L.A. Zombie Hardcore, is available at lazombie.com), but I would also like to share with you a previously unpublished portfolio of Polaroids I took at a performance art event called Visions of Excess in London a couple of years ago, curated by Ron Athey and Lee Adams. The object of the exercise was to put members of the public in a bloody terrorist abduction scenario and see how they related to the roles of victim and victimizer, how they responded to being splattered in blood, and how they chose to represent themselves in relation to the gun. Hey, if the popular media won’t share examples of neo-fascist violence in Western democracies with you, why not DIY?

It’s a simple experiment that you can try yourselves at home. Just make sure the gun isn’t loaded.