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Flaming Fire presents Eternal Christmas: A Yuletide Dreamland

Complaining about Christmas is tired.

Complaining about Christmas is tired. If I hear one more person whining about all the shitty people they have to buy gifts for or how Grampa seems to be extra racist lately, I'm going to hurl my scorching bodega coffee at them. Have you ever thought maybe you're just doing it wrong? Chicago artist Camilla Ha and NYC arts collective Flaming Fire make none of your simpleminded mistakes in their celebration of the yuletide season. They're living it up in a Brooklyn storefront called The Temple of the Dying King with all the festive sweaters, pine-scented skeletons, and experimental black-metal that make the season great, and none of the bullshit, post-Christian, first-world, rich-person problems.

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Upon entering the installation space you are immediately engulfed by the White Glitter Room, where bands serenade you with bleeps, bloops, and screams to get you in the spirit. "I wanted to bring it back to pagan winter solstice," Ha told me, "tapping into a collective human consciousness. I want to bring back meaning to something that's lost its meaning."

The night I went, Anna Barie from These Are Powers was doing her side project Cntrl Top. "I don't really like to speak for Cntrl Top," she said of her alter ego, "but she's about positive noise and pantyhose. And honoring the holy trinity of Elvis, George Michael, and Jesus."

With menacingly tight slimming/shaping garments and loops of utterly destroyed holiday samples, she made me feel like I was shopping in a department store housed in a shattering igloo in outer space.

Then she made a snow angel out of chads!

It was a special kind of angel.

Delving further into the temple's loamy recesses, I found an ice cave glowing from within. This was "The Grandmother Room," and it smelled like hippies.

It's just like being at your grandmother's house, if your grandmother has phallic totems, active volcanoes, and shapeless, bird-eating monsters lying all over the place.

I know mine does. Bitch never throws anything away.

The next room was very dark and very piney. There were alien skeletons hanging by their feet, presumably coming in for a landing on the scattered tree branches. It was spooky in a good, Christmas-y way, and made me feel all tingly in the face.

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Back out front, I checked out an instrument called the Dewanatron, a "double primate console" the insertion of 25¢ into which produces a four-minute avant-garde musical experiment.

Then who did I come upon manning the crystalline decks but former Vice online editor Liz Armstrong. Liz always plays the coolest shit, so I asked about Bam Bam, the band then-currently playing through the mega-speakers.

"I had a penpal in high school," she replied. "He sent me this song on a mix. I met him through Lisa Carver's 'zine Roller Derby, in the classifieds where creepy people looked for other creepy people. One weekend I lied to my parents and flew to DC to meet him" And was he creepy? "Yes!"

"Did you guys do the ugly-clothes thing together?" a random guy interjected. We were about to get all "Hey, fuck you!" but then we remembered we had, in fact, done the ugly-clothes thing together back in Spring of '09.

There is always at least one buggy-eyed older dude with a backpack who turns up at these types of things. What's he keep in there?

What could be more festive than a guy puking demons?

Before leaving I watched Camilla Ha's band perform feats of sonic deconstruction and visual hallucination. The smoking cups of dry ice--err, Yule cheer--made a pleasing tableau with Camilla's sexxy shoes as she mewled and chanted and writhed.

The exhibit runs through January 5th with tons more awesome happenings including an all-day blowout on Christmas day/night and a super spectacular party on New Year's Eve. And if you think your band should play there, they probably can.

JAMIE PECK
PHOTOS BY REBECCA LOPEZ-HOWES