By DP Fleming, D Pressing News Senior Staff Reporter.Check out my series The SEX LIFE of Andy Ashling and my memoir The Girl Who Had No Enemies: and the MaN WhO HaTeD WoMeN and She Had No Enemies at Amazon.com.
On that fateful Sunday, March 28, 2010, HERDing GNats, in collaboration with the newly established D Pressing News Film Series, presented S/Hemales Done Bang Rocks—a new multi-media work by artist Arty Zweary. The event was held at the prestigious Win Fred's Whore Auditorium for admission prices of $8.00 regular, $3.95 seniors, $3.99 students. This reporter obtained a free pass by stripping off his clothes and attending nude.
Working on avant guarde films that exploit cabbage, Arty Zweary's work has shown locally on a TV set in East St. Louis, on a shoe sole near Tower Grove Park, and on an iPOD in the vicinity of University City's Loop area. Zwearian art is known internationally as "stuff that sucks".
S/Hemales Done Bang Rocks, was a multimedia event that featured someone's fingernails, dancers smoking broad-leafed weeds, and three-legged Ninja field mice in raincoats made from chicken beaks. Additional collaborators included dancer Trashy Fate, karate vegetarian master cook Banana PlumPudding, musician T-Bone Fishnet, and an ensemble playing ethnic music from the Area 51 airplane hangars in Nevada. The ensemble was led by legendary crosscut saw and biscuit player Rippy Heehaw.
Zweary showed a total of 5 videos: Medication on Morphine; Pansy-I-am; Blew Queer; Ballad Pee Mile*, and White What? (* indicates North American premier screening) .
Pansy-I-am will receive its world premier on February 31, 2010 at the BP gas station at Grand and highway 40. This reporter has been contracted to appear nude and unconscious at the event.
Conceptually, S/Hemales Done Bang Rocks arose from Zweary's quest to connect the art of two very famous artists: Pop artist Andy Warhol and Thomas Kinkade (MASTER OF LITE). On a 3-day journey to his basement, Zweary searched his laundry room for posters of Kincadian and Warholian works for a video he was creating, entitled White What?
Over the course of his 72-hour travels, Zweary sent three text messages to friends on the second floor of his home. The messages documented his round trip journey from a light switch to his liquor cabinet. These text messages were used as a 10-second narratives, read by Zweary, that interrupted the films in a very gone way, Daddy-O.
In Zweary’s words, “My videos were born when I finally succumbed to the glitches in my camcorder very early in 2010. At that time I could see musical possibilities by mixing editing errors caused by my sticky keyboard and hiccups from spicy food during Windows XP crashes. I also see single-framed dead people in my dreams."
To open the show, musician Rippy Heehaw cut stale biscuits with his crosscut saw synchronized with three parking lot attendants banging flashlights on sacks of wet socks. Trashy Fate, funeral director of the "Dancing Corpse Company", and a recipient of the Grateful They're Dead Award, accompanied Medication on Morphine by lying on the floor and breathing. Dressed in a Snuggie blanket (as seen on TV!), Banana PlumPudding spread gallons of clotted cream on herself as the film Pansy-I-Am's images were displayed on it. (This reporter slipped on some cream clots and jammed a pencil in his ...but I digress.)
Finally, local multi-instrumentalist T-Bone Fishnet slowly poured Schlafly's beer from a magnum bottle into a tub of orange Jell-O from a height of ten feet during the screening of Ballad Pee Mile. The orange-peely flavor of the beer made it difficult, but not impossible, for this reporter to get hammered and ignore remarks about the size of his genitalia.
Most enjoyed the special evening which included complimentary Cheese Whiz on nicotine flavored cardboard and plenty of Jell-O flavored beer. The evening raised STRANGE and WONDERFUL questions over the appropriateness of the admission price.
No rodents were harmed until after the show when they were attacked by gnats herded from the auditorium.
5 out of 4 stars!
