Tag Archives: Drugs

Sam Korman: The Interview (Finally)

Posted on June 16, 2011 | Leave a comment

Approximately one month ago, on the evening Friday the 13th of May, I sauntered dressed in my finest chinos and button-down Ralph Lauren to one of my favorite North Portland watering holes: The Saratoga. Being that it was a Friday, I’d been drinking Bud Light Lime since 8:30am and felt a profound fire in my Hanes that only the wettest of barely legal trim could extinguish.  To put it quite simply, T-Dobbz was looking to get some stinky on his hang down.

And it is at this point that I must share with you, dear reader, a very personal and very intimate detail about said hang down.  There is an odd, recessive gene that seems to consistently make itself manifest in generation after generation of the Dobson clan.  Like my father before me and his father before him, my shaft-to-head ratio is incredibly unorthodox.  To put it bluntly, my dick looks like a string of waxed dental floss with a can of Campbell’s Chunky Soup hanging on the end of it.

Despite an ostensible handicap, this righteous raconteur has managed to stuff his malicious member into the bleeding hatchet wounds of nameless women an average of four nights per week for the last five years in this city.  As I entered the Saratoga that evening, I felt virile and alert, ready to sniff out the next carnal conquest.  But something was awry that Friday night – the place smelled of oak and pine; a lumberyard full of wood.  Don’t get me wrong, the Saratoga is by no means known for its high number of ladies in attendance on any given night. What struck me as odd though was the fact that from what I could tell, there was not even a single female present.  And all of the men appeared strikingly similar, large bellies, exposed carpets of chest and back hair, and the beards… Good Gawd, the beards.  Assuming that perhaps the bitches where out back puffing grits and sharing gossip about television or something, I saddled up to the bar and ordered a triple Beam with a milk back.

At about this time, I realized that the aural environment was radically different than on my previous visits.  Generally, the bartenders (without a shred of irony) sling alcoholic drinks and play albums by Fugazi on repeat.  I guess you could call them “Repeaters,” yes? Anyway, the Chaka Khan greatest hits album pouring from the jukebox gave me pause and I resurveyed the scene from my barstool. On the small stage at the south end of the bar, a fuzzy gentleman with an impressive tummy snagged a microphone and interrupted “Pack My Bags” to make a curious announcement.

“It’s so great to see all of you bitches out here once again at the Saratoga!” he screamed, much to my confusion.  I saw no bitches whatsoever.

“I’d like to personally thank the Saratoga for once again hosting the baddest, biggest bear party in town: Bearracuda!”

The crowd erupted in an orgasmic applause and the music kicked back in at twice its original volume.  Literally EVERYONE started dancing their asses off in a sweaty, hairy mess and what I witnessed next destroyed every semblance of reality that I thought that I knew.  Men, hairy, tattooed, wife beater-wearing men, BEGAN TO FURIOUSLY MAKE OUT WITH ONE ANOTHER!  I screamed and momentarily fainted, dropping both my Beam and my glass of milk to the floor. But I was only out for a millisecond, as the sound of the glass shattering on the concrete underneath my barstool snapped me back into what I thought was some kind of obscenely lucid night terror.  One of them ran up to me and tousled my hair, giving my nipple a quick tweak for good measure.  Like a bolt of straight lightning, I shot through the perspiring mess of flesh, narrowly escaping a laundry list of sodomies of which I’ve never even heard.

I choked down the cool night air outside of the bar, the muffled bass of the music inside still pulsing through the Saratoga’s walls.  In a complete daze, I lumbered south on N Interstate Avenue with no particular destination in mind.  How much time passed, I cannot be certain.  But when I finally jolted out of my post-bear stupor, I was staring at the blazing neon lights of everyone’s favorite North Portland tiki bar and karaoke haunt: The Alibi. If there’s a straighter bar in this city, I’d challenge you to tell me.  Many a night, I have found myself here cocked on booze, fingering a hot mess in one of their expansive booths with one hand while I pick at a plate of free buffet sweet ribs with the other.  Following the outlandishly sinful hedonism of Bearracuda, what I needed now was a shot at the mic and a something stiff to put in my mouth, like a drink.

Inside of the bar, as I was ordering another triple Beam with a milk back, I heard a honey-laced tenor crooning out a karaoke rendition of “Criminal” by Fiona Apple.  The voice sounded strangely familiar, and as I rounded the corner, I recognized none other than former director of the now defunct Car Hole Gallery Sam Korman strutting his stuff on the stage.  The song concluded and I began a dramatic slow clap, meandering towards the stage at a leisurely pace. Korman spotted me immediately and waved me over to his table; he was alone, and in need of a friend.

Before this serendipitous meeting, we’d been emailing back and forth for a few weeks attempting to arrange a time for an interview.  I was interested in his work at the gallery (read: his garage) and wanted to talk to him about a new magazine he was pushing called YA5.  Without even needing to explain what was about to happen, I produced my Zoom H2 Digital Recorder from my back pocket and placed it on the table.  Korman raised an eyebrow knowingly, and it was on.

________________________________________________________

TD: Let’s get down to business.  What the fuck happened with Car Hole?  Did your financers back out or some shit?  Be honest, don’t put my dick in a kangaroo pouch, Korman.  

SK: I closed it. After about ten months of doing Car Hole, I realized I had gotten everything I wanted out of it and I didn’t want to start to repeat myself, which is something I saw starting to happen. It was not meant to last. You came, you saw how the walls crumbled. And there was never any financial backing. I stole the photocopies from PSU for the catalogs and there’s only so many times you can ask artists to make work on their own dime. I thought about it like a first album or some kind of editing. I released the book and left it at that, I didn’t want to beat the project into the ground and I didn’t want to have some shitty, overproduced sophomore release. There was only so much to be done in that space. And, kind of like any live show, people started to find out about it and that’s when you need to leave them wanting — I had already played for my friends, that’s why I did Car Hole in the first place. But I still live there, all the lights are still up. My roommate parked his truck in there for a few months after it closed. I thought that was appropriate.

TD: That sounds like a respectable decision.  You wouldn’t want to treat it like Two and a Half Men and go on for nine fucking seasons, right?  Plus, it’s still got that killer Portland Trailblazers painting on the door that says, “The Rain.”  I like that because I like sports because I am a male.  I hope that you also identify with sports as a male, despite your handicap of being an artist.  What was your favorite moment over the course of Car Hole’s run?  Did Alex Felton ever punch a woman or anything like that?

SK: Alex never punched anyone, but I think my favorite night at Car Hole was a night Alex held his first chicken. Her name was Penelope. You were there that night, when you roasted Derek Franklin. My crazy neighbor came over with a little fence and asked if her chickens could graze on a little patch of grass. Alex said he would help and then all of the sudden, my neighbor starts walking around the gallery showing her chickens all the art on the walls. Not long after that, this weirdo on a Huffy mountain bike comes screeching through everyone, making bird calls. He stops at the end of the block and walks back and takes out a pizza shaped Tupperware container and asks if anyone likes vegetarian pizza, and he opens the thing to show that it’s full of scraggly homegrown weed. He asks if he can roll a joint, which he does and starts handing out nugs of weed while he tells everyone about how he works for his parents and keeps getting fired because he leaves his weed in the apartments he’s supposed to clean or gets high and leaves the water on in the tub while he takes a nap and it destroys the floor — bear in mind that he’s easily 50.

TD: Please don’t talk about bears. 

SK: What?

TD: Nothing. Never mind. Go on.

SK: OK… he grabs a beer, makes a loud bird call, gets back on his bike and leaves. After that there were the weird people in the car that chewed gum loudly and asked what we were all laughing at and then they singled out Arnold (Kemp) and it got weird. That  was my favorite opening and I think a perfect send off for Derek.

TD: It sounds like Car Hole was giving Worksound Gallery a run for its money. It’ll be up for the readers to decide if they like partying in miniature garages or gigantic warehouses better.  I personally enjoy the intimacy of the garage.  So, Car Hole is dead (Love live Car Hole), but you’ve been busy.  I think that you made a newspaper or something?  Didn’t Larry Rinder write for it?  How the fuck did you pull that off?  

SK: I started YA5 with Gary (Robbins) at Container Corps. I kind of freaked out after I closed Car Hole and didn’t really know what I was going to do or how to keep up some of the momentum I thought I had built up, so I had an idea and immediately sent Gary  an email. The title was going to be a bit longer, but once David Knowles came on board, we abbreviated it to YAS and then YA5, which is a design-y thing to indicate that there will be five issues per year–I don’t think it’s that hard to figure out what the letters stand for.

YA5 combines two of the things from Car Hole that became really important to me: writing and facilitating other people’s work. We solicit everything for the journal, though that has largely meant that we rely on friends, vague acquaintances and cold calling — which has worked, actually. We haven’t received any unsolicited submissions yet, but I guess that could happen. I don’t know.

TD: What about Larry?

SK: Oh, and with Larry. He rules. He’s incredibly generous and friendly — we met when he and his boyfriend, Colter hosted us for a Publication Studio release in San Francisco.

TD: Boyfriend? Oh, man…

SK: Did something happen to you earlier?

TD: No. Continue.

SK: Israel Lund and I made a book about Thrasher and Larry had written a new story, illustrated by Colter’s photographs. All I did was email Larry once we started seeking contributors for YA5 and he said yes. Colter is doing something very similar to Larry’s article for the music issue — kind of a regular column. In the end, though, I feel a bit bad about never returning the keys to his house when I stayed there in January. They’re in my desk drawer and I always cringe when I see them.

TD: I’m glad to see that somebody else in town is still interested in writing.  I seriously can’t think of one other person in the entire city besides myself who writes.  Wait, Lisa Radon does.  And so does Patrick Collier.  But literally no one else.  No one.  So, you made a book about Thrasher with Israel Lund.  Was it a real book or a zine?

SK: It was a tribute book… Just photos of skaters we liked that had appeared in Thrasher over the years. I gave a “reading” of the book in SF, where I described the images and tricks and spots by their skate names, like “Stevie Williams switch-flip back tail at the bump to yellow bar in LA.” I think Israel was the only person in the audience that knew what I was talking about. And a copy was just sent to the magazine, because they have a section where they review zines and printed ephemera that people send them. The stuff that gets reviewed is mostly original content and I like to see the covers they print in the mag. Really weird names, too. Or just stupid ones. If it makes it into Thrasher, that would really complete the book for me.

TD: So it was a zine.  Let’s get serious for a minute here: would you fight Brad Adkins?  

SK: I am not an authority on Brad Adkins, but I think I could take him. After I beat him up, you’d call him Brad Ass-kicked-in. Unless he knows how to rip out throats. He is from Montana, after all.

TD: Everybody and their fucking mother is from Montana in Portland.  Where are you from?  Wait, let me guess – Palestine?  

SK: You mean Israel?

TD: Israel Lund?

SK: Jesus. No, I am from Buffalo, NY. Nobody in Portland is from Buffalo –except for two winos I met on the street. One time, a guy dressed as a pirate asked to have his picture taken with me, because I was wearing a Buffalo Bills sweatshirt and he was a huge fan. To reiterate: a 45 year old man dressed as a pirate wanted to have his picture taken with me, because of what I was wearing.

TD: I’m so glad that this whole pirates-as-a-metaphor-for-how-I-live-by-my-own-rules thing is fucking over. Besides that gentleman, who are some of your favorite white male artists in Portland?

SK: I’ve been into what Alex Mackin Dolan is doing lately. We talked about Real TV where people send in tapes of skate slams or plane crashes at air shows. It was rad. Gary Robbins’ show at Valentine’s and Appendix were both amazing. And, Ashby Lee Collinson. And Krystal South. Not dudes, but between Experimental Half Hour and the Internet, these two are doing super smart things.

TD: So a new edition of YA5 is coming out soon.  What should we expect?

SK: Rodney Graham interview about his record collection. Karaoke. R Kelly. Ambient music. And teenagers on pot. The release is at a karaoke bar, too.

TD: You know my opinions on people illegally tripping on pot, Korman.  But regardless, I wish you luck at the launch.  Any final thoughts or words of wisdom for my obscenely large readership?  

SK: Nope. Free Lund.

________________________________________________________

You can join the party and pick up a FREE copy of the brand spanking new YA5 this Friday here in Portland.  Oh, and you can sing some karaoke.  Make sure to ask Korman to do some Fiona Apple.  He fucking loves that shit.  

YA5 Issue #2 Release Party

Friday, June 17th / 7:00pm @ Galaxy Restaurant & Lounge / PDX

David Knowles interviews Hiwa K
Sam Korman on Karaoke
Hua Hsu on Weed on Mobb Deep
Kari Rittenbach on Distributed Mixes
Sofia Dona on “Twinning Towns”
Alastair Hunt on Nothing
Colter Jacobsen on The Best 24 Hour Music Festival imaginable
Jen Delos Reyes on Mike Love
Matthew Pappich Scores the Future
The Music Appreciation Society interviews Rodney Graham
Alison Halter on R. Kelly

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Secrecy surrounding Portland’s Appendix Project Space raises suspicions

Posted on June 3, 2011 | 4 Comments
Ooooooh, are those sculptures made of natural materials???

Think DK Row broke a scandal wide open with his article about YU?  Check out what the Dobbz dug up, bitches.

An ambitious independent alternative space in Northeast Portland has the local arts community buzzing.

More than twenty people showed up on Last Thursday to Appendix Project Space, an alternative gallery that aims to attract twenty-something no names from areas as exotic as Philadelphia.

The crowd chugged margaritas and tallboys inside the garage-turned gallery.  Supporters point out that Appendix Project Space could be the catalyst to get people to stop pretending that PLACE at Pioneer Place Mall is even remotely interesting.

But already, the cracks are showing.

Appendix Project Space is soliciting donations, with plans to spend nearly $130 this year on paint, spackle and mudding tape.  Its five officers, four local to Portland and one living on the east coast, are planning to launch a several hundred dollar campaign to renovate their garage even further — a garage that they do not own.

Yet they’re cagey on almost every aspect of the project, from their relationship with their landlord to the artists that they intend to pursue.  The officers also appear to be skirting city and state rules — selling beers and cocktails at openings, for example, though the city lists it for use only as a place to park your car.

Appendix has not been cited for any rule violation, nor is it under any investigation.  But other local arts leaders are growing suspicious, questioning Appendix’s finances, long-term stability, and the fact that I think two of them are fucking.

“Are two of them fucking?  I don’t know,” said Sam Korman, founder of the now defunct Car Hole Gallery.  “But when you make your garage into a  gallery, you have to prepare yourself for public scrutiny.”

The risk to the public?  Appendix could spend up to $45 repainting the drywall that they’ve installed in their garage only to get evicted, robbing the public of any benefit.  Rules violations could prompt their landlord to insist on a costly removal of the drywall because I don’t think they asked him if it was OK to put it there in the first place.  Secrecy denies drunk fucks on Alberta the chance to scrutinize where the dollar they spent on their beer actually goes.

Further, beer drinkers have little reassurance that Appendix will keep getting kegs donated.  And at a time when everybody has realized that Widmer gives out free kegs like it ain’t no thing, it’s getting harder and harder to get them to commit the beer.

Other people who own garages and drink beer, especially, emphasize that positive vibes are essential.  Having the door open is key to getting bros to drop in and also drink beer.

“The whole concept is that you don’t have to pay to party,” said Carlos Gonzalez, a performance artist and major clubber. “So you should get a lot of beer so that you can party longer for free.”

Interview cut short

Many garages have tried since a few years ago to establish a national-level contemporary “gallery” in Portland, but none could find good art to show.

Among them: Car Hole Gallery, which closed; I can’t think of any other ones but I bet there are more.

Appendix Project Space entered the scene in 2008, founded by Joshua Pavlacky, a blond guy; his buddy from undergrad, Zachary Davis; and probably somebody else who was a woman.  They recruited Travis Fitzgerald, 24, a fucker with two years of life experience outside of a BFA program  who moved here from New Jersey and also happens to be the heir to the fortune of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Pavlacky, Davis and Fitzgerald recruited Ben Young and Maggie Casey at some point and they are now all the officers and probably roommates.  They’ve boasted about the credibility of the space’s location near Alberta, and have outlined plans to raise $65 for renovations — plus more after that to pay their rent.

Beyond that, the details are hard to come by.  Asked for an interview, Fitzgerald, Appendix’s executive director, said he would speak for the group.  At an April meeting, he would not share specifics on who lives in which room inside the house, which person takes care of the electric bill, the rent paid for each room, donations of kegs by Widmer, artists or other details.  At a follow-up interview in May, he listened to two questions before cutting the meeting short and limiting further communication to email.

A form filed last year for food stamps by Fitzgerald listed his rent as $325 per month, and Davis’s and Casey’s at $375 apiece for 2010.  But which one of them cuts the ultimate check for the landlord is still unanswered; the group this week asked their landlord for a one-week extension on payment for the overall rent.

Changes at Appendix

Other issues surround the garage.  Joshua Pavlacky originally found the house on Craigslist in 2008 in the “rentals” section.  He paid the original rent of $1025, then sublet his own room back to himself for only $200 the first month.  Reasons are unclear.

Pavlacky left the house and moved to Philadelphia last year, and Davis received the honor of “House Don” and took over.  Davis, a member of the Wesleyan College alumni group in the Pacific Northwest, which is a bunch of liberal arts pussies who drive hybrid cars, could not be reached for this story and did not respond to a poke that I sent him on Facebook.

Fitzgerald said that Appendix pays $1o a year to host their domain for their website, but that Davis has twice now paid that amount and not been reimbursed by Maggie Casey.  Otherwise, he declined to discuss Davis’ role or to even name him.  “As we have made clear, Appendix’s webmaster wishes to remain anonymous,” he wrote in an email.

Meanwhile, Ben Young runs a fabrication studio and Fitzgerald sometimes plays a piano in their living room.  The two artists have listed Appendix as their home, and the building appeared on Last Thursday in May to contain living quarters.  Under IRS rules that prohibit using a nonprofit for personal gain, they are required to pay fair-market rent.

Appendix’s leaders also have a kitchen in their kitchen and a bookshelf someplace else, and Appendix paid Portland artists nothing last year to show in their space.

But the city has no records of Fitzgerald actually receiving the food stamps for which he applied, and this bums some people out because he dresses really well and it makes you wonder how he prioritizes his money, right?  The artists, a bunch of liberal fucks, referred all questions to Fitzgerald.

Fitzgerald, by email, sidestepped questions and did not give pecifics.  Asked about rent and living arrangements, for instance, he wrote: “Davis and Young’s studio/offices are Appendix offices to carry out work for Appendix.  Appendix has recently invited some people over for dinner to make sure that they have friends.”

 ”Now is the time”

Arts supporters are left to wonder.

“I don’t feel like they invite enough people over for their dinners, or even know how to cook to be honest,” said Korman, the Car Hole founder.

Jeff Jahn, a Portland critic for his own blog, hadn’t heard of Appendix before but mentioned that “Appendix” is a tennis company that makes really solid balls.

But Israel Lund, a prominent popular guy, is an Appendix supporter and among those excited about the possibility of maybe getting another solo show in 2012.

“I think Portland is at a really important point of great cultural promise,” he said, “and now is the time to fulfill it.”

– Tanner Dobson

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VICE Correct for the First Time in History

Posted on May 24, 2011 | Leave a comment
I’d do ass-to-mouth with both of them.

Aside from consistently describing the gross-outs of gay culture, I rarely find that VICE Magazine says anything even remotely considered accurate in terms of legitimate journalism.  If I have to read another article by that Iranian hipster who trips on illegal drugs and writes about it one more time, it’s going to be a one-way ticket to Rapeville for his candy ass.  And by Rapeville, I mean I’m going to have sex with him without his consent (this transcends being a homosexual act because I wouldn’t be enjoying it, only teaching him a lesson).

But yesterday, in their blog section Viceland Today, those scarf-wearing frat boys in fags’ clothing managed to pump out a little editorial that thoroughly blew my mind.  Not once since I began this written cultural crusade over a year ago have I stumbled across another writer  as elegant and truly gritty as myself.  Sadly, the author of the post to which I’m referring cowers behind the pseudonym Glen Coco, fearing to take ownership over the content he or she has produced.  What a fucking pussy.  If you’re not familiar with Glen Coco, you might troll the recesses of your mind for a memory related to the nearly flawless Tina Fey vehicle Mean Girls.

The review that’s got my scrotum so pleasantly saggy at the moment is on a retrospective hosted right now at Hayward Gallery of Young British Artist/Middle-Aged British Slut Tracey Emin.  I’d encourage you to navigate to the article by clicking here and giving your brain a reality check.

Nice work, VICE.  For the time being, you can consider yourself unraped.

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Open Engagement 2011: Gayer?

Posted on May 17, 2011 | 3 Comments

Margaret Kilgallen would roll over in her grave at that hand painted text.

It’s definitely up for debate (because last year’s was so gay), but I’d like to submit for your consideration, dear reader, that the Portland State University Open Engagement Conference 2011 was actually GAYER than last year’s!

And the only reason that anything that I say about the conference is up for debate is because I avoided the thing like the motherfucking black plague.  Maybe you and your friends went and knit sweaters to protest gentrification, but I was home guzzling Bud Light Limes and jerking off to Flower Tucci‘s gushing squirt garden on YouPorn.  If you’ve ever buried your man mouth in the depths of a woman who gushes shejaculate™ even 1% as much as Tucci, you can count yourself amongst God’s chosen ones.  In between soaking my keyboard with my flawless seed though, I perused the Open Engagement 2011 website and feel like I digested the majority of the festival without once having to make a friend map, talk about urban gardening, or eat leeks with a room full of rejects from the cast of Glee.

Last year, I was actually (sort of) invited to attend one of their dinner events, which you can read about here.

I guess this year the festival’s organizers decided that the Social Practice crowd needed to start defining its terms (artists are always fucking talking about doing this) and they hastily threw together a series of five “themes that encompass ideas connected to social practice.”  I’d like to point out that the website capitalizes Social Practice when referring to its MFA program but leaves it all lower case when discussing it in any other capacity.  Why that’s important isn’t clear to me yet, but I’m sure that it’s important.  Booger rodeo, right?  Anyway, the core themes (and my interpretations of them) were:

  • Peoples & Publics (two words that do not need to be pluralized)
  •  Social Economies (the kind that interest poor people who voluntarily placed themselves $60K in debt to learn how to share)
  • In Between Places (they wanted to use the term liminal, but thought that it was “too heady” – Social Practice artists, despite what one would rightfully assume, don’t even smoke pot)
  • Tracking & Tracing (I’m pretty sure the first is about checking your Blogspot stats and the second is how they all draw)
  • Sentiments & Strategies (how to trick white people into feeling good when they think about art)

The key presenters this year were Julie Ault, Fritz hAeG and Pablo Helguera.  No, I don’t know who those people are either.  At least last year they managed to trick Mark Fucking Dion into showing up by offering their entire population of art school students to make one of his pieces for free.  Life is art.

"Guys, I know it will use up a lot of gas which is kind of wack, but what if we painted a limo LIKE A FUCKING SCHOOL BUS?"

A bunch of wiggers got way stoked this year because the Bruce High Quality Foundation was invited to join the conference and talk about their unaccredited BHQF University which was touring across the United States in a limo painted like a school bus.  Nothing like a little institutional critique in a college-sponsored conference – subversive!  Or wait, transgressive?  Or wait, nobody cares?

Hmm… what else… I don’t know.  I read a bunch of the project descriptions and it sounds like there was a group of lesbians from New York who meet in solidarity to critique each other’s work and feel oppressed by not inviting men.  One guy in the festival was doing a project where you could ask him to match you up with a best friend for a day.  I like the idea of somebody traveling completely alone from Florida to attend this conference and needing to be matched up with a buddy.  That’s all that I like.  I think the project is fucking gay.  Actually, a lot of the projects at the conference this year are intentionally gay, like the Queer Explorer’s Club, who somehow forgot that the only thing gay people ever discovered was Miami.

You should always be skeptical of a festival or series of events featuring a roster of over 100 artists whose websites all end in .org, despite the fact that not one of them is certified with 501(c)(3) status.  Also, anything that Ted Purves is involved in should automatically disqualify it from being considered even in the galaxy of art.  How the fuck can you run an MFA program at a private art school in one of the most expensive cities in the country and then claim that your art practice engages gift economies?  Is it because you live in Oakland instead of the city?  I’m sure the black people appreciate it.

There’s really nothing else to say about the conference because from what I heard, less people attended than were actually featured in it.  Maybe one of the core themes next year should be “Promotion & Dispersion.”

"Please stop raping my legacy, Harrell."

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WORKSOUND: Done Sucking?

Posted on February 25, 2011 | 1 Comment

The painting is not actually shaped like that.

This month’s exhibition “Maybe Not” at Worksound is described in the promotional materials as, “a show about transgression, catastrophe and failure.”  It’s certainly about one of those – ZING! No, but seriously, how the nipplefuck I ended up down there a couple of Fridays ago is beyond me.

Yum.

You see, last summer at the Portland Art Critics annual dinner at Red Robin on MLK, the rest of this city’s tastemakers and I unanimously decided that we would henceforth eschew any type of acknowledgement of Worksound as a legitimate arts institution.  In attendance were DK Row, Jeff Jahn, Chas Bowie, Richard Speer, Patrick Collier and a woman named Lisa Radon.  Each of us swore a blood oath, rendered official and binding as our self-inflicted wounds gushed steaming red fluid from clenched fists onto a basket of bottomless fries.  It was our intention, as phrased so eloquently by Mr. Row, to “burn that motherfucker to the ground.”

DK Row = JK Rowling???

And to be quite frank, I had been doing a damned fine job of avoiding Modou Dieng’s night club/gallery ever since.  But on Friday, February 11th in the year of our Lord 2011, I fucked up.  BIG TIME.

THE SLAMMER.

Any of you familiar with the way that a Friday night begins generally taking shape at 2:00pm will understand the foggy condition in which I found myself early on in the evening.  While I’ll admit to being in Southeast Portland on purpose that afternoon, it was absolutely not my intention to set foot anywhere near 820 SE Alder Street.  But after a few hours at the Slammer Tavern and drinking three consecutive Creamy Mexicans, I lost complete control of my person.  A Creamy Mexican is a beer bong filled with a half gallon of Vitamin D whole milk and eight shots of Cuervo.  Try one on for size… unless you’re a racist.

At approximately 7:15pm, my good friend and writing colleague Kilgore Trout arrived after having been called by no less than two employees of the Slammer, demanding that I be removed from the premises.  It wasn’t so much that I made a scene; they were, in my opinion, reacting a little severely to my beating the shit out of a woman wearing a John Lennon t-shirt ON JEB BUSH’S BIRTHDAY.  Give peace a chance?  Give my fists performing a clitoral circumcision all over your pussy a chance, you Marxist cum dumpster.  If there’s one thing that I hate more than the Nation of Islam, it’s John Fucking Lennon (not that the two are mutually exclusive).

VROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

Trout dragged me out just in time to dodge the boys in blue, who came lapping and snarling in their Ford Crown Vics and motor bikes, hungry for the blood of the Dobson.  We ducked quickly into Beaker & Flask, which was so crowded I got my first period.  Bleeding obscenely from between my thighs, I coughed in a fit of desperation and Trout carried me fireman-style through the Beavertonians and Greshamites that infest this fine city on weekends.  When we were finally back outside, we noticed that police were in the process of shutting down a three-block radius around the Slammer in hopes of catching the Leonardo DiCaprio of art criticism.  Reaching into my boot, I drew out my handgun and mentally prepared myself to go out in a blaze of glory.  Christ and I made peace and I was ready to die.

But it would not be my day to be martyred, as Trout once again grabbed me over his shoulders and ran with the grace of a lemur across SE 7th Ave towards the industrial district.  The crackling of gun fire pierced the cold winter air and I felt bullets whizzing past my body.  I was utterly confused as to why the Portland Police Bureau would open fire on me – I am white and I live in a house.  One might assume at this point that I would have experienced a kind of empathy for the brothers on the streets, but I didn’t.

With the police hot on our trail, Trout nimbly maneuvered around corners until we found ourselves staring face-to-face with the front door of Worksound.

“We’ll hide in here,” Trout said, gasping for breath.

“Fat fucking chance,” I shot back. “I have a pact with DK Row!”

“Tanner, I recognize and respect the brotherhood of art criticism and the seriousness with which you all handle your values – especially in a city where art criticism is widely recognized as one of the most serious engagements with culture one can undertake.  However, in light of the current situation that we are facing that involves possibly being shot to death, I propose that we hide the one place that a police officer would never look if he thought he was chasing a black man.”

It was as clear as day.  “An art gallery!” I squealed.

Is that stenciled?

He set me back upon my feet and we dashed like lesbian lizards towards the doors.  Reaching the sidewalk in front of the gallery, I went into a perfect front handspring and tumbled through the open doorway, coming back to a standing position directly in front of one of the artists in the show: Ralph Pugay.

(L-R) Ralph "Wiggum" Pugay and Dana "Carvey" Franklin

The main room of Worksound was devoted to a collection of recent works by Pugay; paintings of silly and nasty things that can either give you a boner or make sure that you never get one again.  He is terribly underrated in this city and for that I blame, oh, let’s say Storm Tharp.  Much of Ralph’s work interests me a great deal, and much of it makes me want to punch his stupid face into his stupid brain.

*Interests me...

*Makes me want to punch Ralph...

What really jiggles my Uncle Tom though about his work is that it somehow simultaneously looks like complete genius, and like the work of a four year-old with prostate cancer.  What sets Pugay apart though from the rest of the idiots all over this half of the country making naïve pieces is the fact that he can actually paint.  The depiction of human bodies in his work is often crude, but the little bastard knows how to paint inside the lines.  I’m looking at you, Chris Johanson.

At one point in the evening, Pugay asked me directly if his face was getting red.  This was an attempt to bait me into making a derogatory comment about how Asians look ridiculous when drunk.  So I made one.

I have tried like fifty times to figure out what the fuck is happening in this picture and I still have no fucking clue.

If you haven’t been paying attention to Pugay’s work over the last couple of years, then it means that you suck dick.  I’m not going to fully endorse this little fucker because part of me thinks that sometimes he might be making fun of Christianity in his work.  But until I can specifically point out an instance in the work where that is happening, I’ll continually describe him to friends around town as at least a 5.5/10.

I didn't even do that sick edge-burn in a digital program. It just happened.

Around the bend was a suite of new work by everyone’s favorite Camus-drunk self-flagellator Michael Reinsch.  Naturally, I was expecting to walk into the room and be assaulted by a visual overload of streamers, balloons and him awkwardly marching around in his underpants.  What I witnessed though was a pleasant surprise to say the least.  Reinsch had hung a series of small, intimate photographs around the room and he was wearing adult clothes!

Would you let this man watch your kids? I would... if they were your kids.

We spoke for a bit about this new project, part of an ongoing series he has loosely titled LURK.  The images were all slightly blurry or pixilated, and Reinsch explained that each is a screen grab from his own computer of the interior of a stranger’s home via their own webcam.  What a fucking creep.  Regardless of how much Reinsch masturbates privately to images of other people’s computer chairs and Wilco posters is less important to me than the overall relevance of this project in contemporary culture.  We’re talking about individuals who are voluntarily setting themselves up for surveillance.  Orwell can eat my fuck.  Reinsch’s new body of work reminds me of something that my father, Theodore Dobson, told me at a very young age:

SURVEILLANCE IS FREEDOM.

That’s the entire notion behind the Patriot Act, people.  Finally, an artist around town is learning to embrace the need our country has to keep tabs on its citizens and its visitors.  We absolutely have to watch everybody, all the time.

I am opposed to Big Government.

As I walked out of Reinsch’s area, I ran into Trout again as he was chatting with a buxom young blonde with whom he had absolutely no chance.  Nonetheless, I admired his audacity and praised his unwillingness to waiver from the task at hand.  She introduced herself as Hester Prynne, which sounded oddly familiar.  I think we may have swapped cum at the Phoenix Biltmore in 2004 after McCain bowed down to the Obama Machine on national television.

(L-R) Kilgore Trout and Hester Prynne.

Once Trout had finally taken the hint, we wandered to the final room to take a gander at Lori Gilbert’s body of work.  While certainly all over the place in terms of media, somehow it kind of worked.  On the far wall was a drawing of Melissa Joan Hart (schwing!) that prompted much debate amongst the attendees.  Near that was a wall-based text piece that was vinyl or paint or something else that people put on walls.  It consisted of a list of names of hoes who married dudes in prison for murder and shit like that.  This was tight, because marriage is a hot issue these days.

I don't know what the fuck to type about this.

The space featured a few other works including a jar with a bunch of lint in it that is supposedly from philosophy books, indicating that Gilbert seldom reads.  My favorite piece of all though was another text piece that was positioned against the wall on the floor that read simply, “Cute shoes.”  Fuck yeah.  I love shoes.

META.

Gilbert’s a woman, but you wouldn’t know it just by looking at her work.  This is a major step for a female artist.  Where I see her going next is dropping the last letter in her first name to make her even more androgynous on exhibition announcements.  Plus, it sounds like a cool male movie start from the old days: Lor Gilbert.  Right?

It’s paining me to say this, but I didn’t hate the show at Worksound.  I feel like kind of a bitch even typing that, but I’m a straight-shooter (and lover) and I call ‘em like I see ‘em.  If DK Row wants to climb up on my dick about breaking our little pact, I’ll put him in Mayor Sam Adams’ dickhole for a week.  The rest of the gang present at Red Robin so long ago will have to just deal.  Before any of you go firing off an angry e-mail to me calling me a sell-out, get your ass down to Worksound and see what all the fuss is about.

As I left the gallery, I kept looking over my shoulder for police but it seemed the coast was clear.  Trout sure was right about one thing, cops don’t think black people look at art.

Not a black person.

 

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Yelp is the new PORT

Posted on February 6, 2011 | 2 Comments

Slags,

I’ve decided to experiment a little bit with all of this “Social Media” that they have in movies now.  My first ever exhibition review on Yelp! has just been posted.  You can find it here.

If that link doesn’t work, tell my ass because I’ll post that shit on here also if need be.  It’s about “COLLECT FOUR” at the White Box.  Get real.

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ENTER THE VOID / Feel the ‘Noid

Posted on November 12, 2010 | 6 Comments

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Boil your pipes and scrape the resin, ass-clowns, because France just released your generation’s Holy Fucking Mountain.  It’s like Ghost if the band TOOL directed it and Whoopi Goldberg was played by a piece of shit.

Living in Portland, OR, it’s a pretty regular occurrence to have friends tell you just how fucking epic this or that film is when experienced under the illegal influence of marijuana weed.  Apparently, if you’re a drug-huffing renob, every shitsplitting thing under the sun is enhanced ten fold when experienced while tripping on pot.  Most often, I disregard these claims and just assume that the buttsmuggling hippies in this town are stupid poopgoobers. But after seeing Gaspar Noé’s newest mind-bender Enter the Void, I’ve developed a kind of loose empathy for those who ingest drugs before entering a cinema.  They should still get ass-raped in prison until their quivering death on the cold, ceramic floor of a prison shower for their sins, but I can maybe see why sometimes they need to get stoned-to-the-bone before catching a weeknight flick.

I knew very little about this film before seeing it, except that Portland-based cat artist Craig Wheat wouldn’t shut the fuck up about how the entire trailer featured strobe lights.  Apparently, this made him nervous about whether or not to see it because he is a girl.  Anyway, so I get this text message from none other than Portland’s own Druid-in-Hipster’s-Clothing Damien Gilley on Monday, asking if I’d like to accompany him and his woman to Cinema 21 to take in what he insisted was, “the trippiest movie since Air Bud 2.”  Since I’d burnt my liver to a crisp while visiting Chicago over the weekend, a movie night sounded like just the thing to recuperate.

 

He was a dog that played basketball in the first one, but in the sequel he played football.

We all met up at Muu Muu’s on NW 21st Ave in the stupid-poop district of town for some drinks before the show.  I do realize that I just indicated that I wanted to see a movie in order to give my insides a rest, but you’re stupid.  I had a delicious Bud Light with Lime and eleven shots of Wild Turkey, Gilley opted for some stupid English cream ale called “Spotted Penis” or something of the like.  It should be noted that in the time I put back twelve drinks, Gilley barely got halfway through his.  Seems to me like he might want to change his name to Damien SILLY.  Oh, and you can catch my review on Yelp!, but the fucking waitress’s feet and pussy were completely made out of molasses, because it took a million thousand years just to cash out there.  It was pretty tight though as we were leaving because Damien’s woman totally smashed a glass on the floor in protest of the scrotum-guzzling service.

As you might imagine, I was ready to head into the theater next door and get this stupid art film bullshit over with immediately.  However, the people that Damien and his woman brought are a bunch of drugfaces and just haaaaaaaaaaaad to get stoned before seeing the movie.  Go back to Eugene, you horsefuckers.  This ended up making us late, and being the cultural figure that I am, you can imagine how fucking embarrassed I was to be entering a public space with a bunch of idiots reeking of bong water and dick.  I’d like to take this opportunity to point out that Mr. Gilley did not smoke any of the weed, which caused a weird feeling for me as I instantly respected him more, but completely realized that I don’t understand his art:

Hey, Damien, how much do paintings cost in The Matrix?

We opted to sit up in the balcony so that we could look down on everybody.

What I saw first was completely fucking baffling as we’d arrived late and I did not have any idea how the film had actually started.  Let me just say that Alex Grey is destroying all of his paintings in a Park Slope brownstone right now because of this movie.  So these gay-ass spirals are all flying around on the screen, looking like a giant iTunes visualizer and I got to experience what would end up being an obnoxiously dicksmurfing trope the director and editors would employ for the rest of the film: strobe pulses. Literally, every eight seconds the screen clips black and then back.  If this is what drugs feel like, then you’re gay.  So the magic balls of energy and life-force are like swirling and getting brighter and dimmer and then all this other stupid shit is happening and then the camera like pulls back and you realize that THIS IS JUST A SUPER CLOSE-UP OF LIGHTS ON A CELLPHONE!  WHOA! WHOA! WHOA!

This isn't from the movie, but was the first image on a Google search for "trippy image."

Whoever operated the boom mic in this movie should have been fired because everything sounded all distant and dumb and I was getting pissed.  Basically, this bald white kid who looks like he’s straight out of Trainspotting lives in Tokyo but he’s American and his best friend is Gérard Depardieu who also lives in Tokyo and they are ALL ABOUT tripping balls. Like, literally, it is all that they do. Oh, and they walk up and down really long flights of stairs on the outside of buildings quite a bit because Japan doesn’t give a shit about cripples.  These two are like walking around a bunch, talking about drugs and the whole thing is filmed from the American kid’s perspective. His name is Oscar. Or Josh. Fuck it. The French bozo is like, “You’re a drug dealer now,” and the American kid is like, “No, I just sell ‘em,” and I’m like, “Why the fuck do I ever do anything with Damien Gilley?”

Then the kid is like selling drugs in this shady nightclub, which may or may not be called The Void (get it?) and the cops go apeshit on him and chase him into a stall. He’s flipping out like Aunt Jemima during the Great Syrup Depression of ’92 and trying to flush all these drugs down the potty but the po-lice are pounding at the door yelling a bunch of shit in Chinese.  He’s like, “I am trying to go potty!”  But the cops know better and keep on busting at the door.  Then this retard kid yells that he has a gun, and the pigs plug him right through the door.  He falls down next to the potty, which is like a ceramic hole in the floor in Japan, and is having this internal monologue where he’s trying to figure out if he was really shot or if he’s hallucinating.  This paragraph is kind of a Plot Spoiler, so if you haven’t seen the film yet, you probably shouldn’t have read it.  Keep in mind that he whole time this kid is dying on the floor, we’re still seeing from his perspective and his little piglet fingers are quivering and covered in blood.

This doesn't look like any of the scenes from Trainspotting.

Once this part happens, I guess Oscar or Josh or Dave turns into a ghost and starts to fly all over Tokyo watching people because he’s a pervert.  Oh, I forgot to mention that he has a sister and they have like the gayest relationship ever and are always just almost fucking.  For real.  Their parents are way dead because of some gruesome car accident and the little girl is always screaming, “Noooo!” and kicking about.  Which is weird, because American kids usually just pitch fits and it’s almost always British children who are “kicking about.”   His sister is a stripper in some club in Tokyo and is being banged out by a Chinese guy who owns it and the dead kid like enters his body while he’s banging his sister and it’s super weird.

The movie goes on for a really long time, with the dead kid’s perspective showing us all kinds of different parts of the seedy underbelly of Tokyo’s seedy underbelly.  As it progresses though, we get glimpses of the brother and sister as they are growing up so that we can learn more about them.  In the film industry, this is called “non-linear narrative” and is pretty much only employed by French directors (see: Michel Gondry).  I got bored and rubbed one out under my Patagonia fleece after two  hours or something, and nobody even noticed.  Maybe this movie is supposed be like an all-encompassing trilogy or some shit because it seemed like three different movies in one.  I’ll bet you four gazillion dollars that the stupid director thinks of it as representative of Dante’s Divine Comedy, because all idiots think that their work is about that because you don’t actually have to read it to know exactly what it is about and barely anybody has really read it so they’ll never ask you a specific question about Virgil or Beatrice or if you think that the use of a hendecasyllabic  verse scheme was revolutionary or irritating.

One thing that started happening after about an hour that really pissed me off was the camera, which is ALWAYS shooting from a bird’s eye view it seems, would hover around any thing remotely circular shaped in a room for a spell and then zoom into it really quickly.  This happened with an ash tray, a lamp, a cock ring and an aborted fetus.  Actually, one of those didn’t happen – I bet you can’t guess which one though.  Zooming into this circle meant that this particular vignette had come to a close and we, the audience, would now have to sit through five minutes of pulsing abstract LSD imagery to make sure that the film clocked in at over 2.5 hours, a necessity for any difficult art film.  I’m not even being a penisdoodle when I say that this film could have had about an hour cut from it and the whole “freaky trippy” vibe would have come across just fine.

 

Uh.

The last third of the film was all Asians fucking each other.  I’ve seen a lot of Asian chicks giving dudes blow jobs online, but I’ve never actually seen an Asian chick giving an Asian dude a blow job before. Not once.  Until I saw this movie.  Now, I’ve seen it like twenty-three times, which is Jordan’s number.  At one point, the sister has an abortion and they really, really get into filming it.  I’ve performed my fair share, but I finally get what Walter Benjamin was talking about when he said that camera lenses distance us from the real meat of a situation.  The movie culminates with a CGI scene where the viewer is treated to a first-person perspective of the inside of the sister bitch’s fucking vagina where a giant, digital penis head thrusts in and out of your face.  I am not joking whatsoever.  To make matters worse, the penis belongs to the French butthole and then it blows its wad all over the theater!  So fucking gay.  And then, in the fashion true to the film, we turn into the cum and ride a giant sperm tidal wave through the vaginal walls all the way to an egg and we eat our way inside of it.  This symbolizes that the dead kid just impregnated his sister or something, and so he is going to be reborn because this film is also about Buddhism or something.

There was a lot of babies sucking on nipples also.

The movie ended at like four in the morning and I stumbled out of the theater wondering whether or not it was supposed to fuck with me, or if the director was dead serious.  If the latter is the case, that guy is a retard.

On a scale of I am Curious (Yellow) to Aguirre, the Wrath of God, I give this film a Freddy Got Fingered.

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Midterm Elections Arouse God’s Divine Wang

Posted on November 3, 2010 | 4 Comments

A year ago, I would have wagered that I’d be spending November 2, 2010 drowning my sorrows in a bottle of Jim Beam while watching news broadcasts paralleling the Book of Revelation paint this fine-ass country bluer and bluer by the minute.  Little did I know (so young back then) that Barack O-Bummer would turn out to be a major lame duck President!  His slug’s-pace change agenda, coupled with some real grassroots efforts by my dear friends the Tea Party, has resulted in a general mutiny by the very same confused folks who elected him in the first place.  This collective coming-t0-their-senses restores my faith in the American voting public.  You know, Sarah Palin was a little ahead of her time – Americans weren’t ready to handle the real deal back then.  I’m reminded of Van Gogh, whose importance and life’s work were only recognized after his death.  Thank the Lord for the web – this little social tool has ensured an exponential collapse between obsolescence and iconography; it only took a couple of years for the world to recognize the sweaty truth dribbling violently from the mouths of Palin and her supporters.  The Tea Party has spoken, bitches.  Best listen, lest you get tied to the back of a pickup truck and dragged through the middle of Alabaster, Alabama.

In hindsight, I suppose that I could have predicted this divine power shift several months ago.  As we led up to these historic midterm elections, I should have remembered that the only time that liberals think about the term “midterm” is when it applies to having an abortion.  I’d like to personally extend my thanks to all of the twenty-somethings around the United States for refusing to vote.  Your apathy is our success!  Keep tripping on pot, you fuckers.

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Jeff Jahn Won’t Play Me!

Posted on September 24, 2010 | 1 Comment

Weeeeeeeeeoooooo widdla weeoo-weooo weoooooooooo!

If there’s one thing that everybody in this town knows, it’s that Jeff Jahn and I are basically the Satan and Jesus Christ of art criticism.  Jahn represents fetish and deconstruction, I stand for values and faith!  Why then, when it seems like it has the potential to be an epic battle of Good vs Evil, won’t this man play me in a game of tennis?  Wait, is it a game or a match?

Who fucking cares.  If tennis is a gentleman’s sport, then I’ve got to have an inherent ability to kick ass at it.  I’ve never played tennis myself, since it actually seems like a pansy sport, but I’d be willing to give it a fucking whirl for the sake of determining who wears the real critical pants in town.  And you all know damn well that you’d love to see that game go down.

Jahn: I’m-a-calling you out.

Bull's eye.

Name a Saturday (excluding this Saturday, September 25th and Saturday, October 9th) and a court and it’s on.  I’m going to have to buy a racquet (is that how you spell that???) and some of those elastic bands to keep my glasses on my face, but I’ll shell out the twenty bucks or whatever to drive your candy ass into the ground.  Send me an e-mail at tannerdobson@gmail.com, or post a reply right here, if you dare…

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Lesbos in Iran

Posted on September 16, 2010 | 2 Comments

Still from: Shirin Nahat's "Women Without Men," 2009

Did you know that they make movies in Iran?  Me neither.

Most of my time at PICA’s TBA Festival each year is spent gorging my liver in the beer garden and chasing tail until my boner is so raw you might mistake it for a pile of wagyu beef.  I tend to avoid the modern dance programming and do virtually everything in my power to refrain from seeing a single one of the films.  But last night, I got backed into a fucking corner hard by an old flame of mine from whom I’d borrowed somewhere in the neighborhood of $13,000 during the course of a two-week romance.  She hit me up using that new, obnoxious as fuck “calling” feature on Gmail.  Having no idea what on earth was happening as my computer began ringing at me, I accidentally accepted the call.

I like to also never use anybody's last fucking name in my e-mail contacts. This keeps it super interesting!

Because I’d generously drained her pussy juices so many times that her vag now looks like Estelle Getty’s (yes, Estelle Getty’s vag now, September 2010), she was still fiending for a loogie of my dick spit.  But when I answered, I didn’t realize this and momentarily panicked.  It seemed reasonable that she was making contact to demand the money owed plus interest (a request to which I would have kindly informed her that fucking herself might be a solid solution).  Needless to say, I was pleasantly surprised when she wasn’t playing the role of loan shark, but rather that of the woman who forgot to make a gay best friend with whom to go to art films and other bullshit.  And while it’s not really my style to go see art-house flicks, especially those by members of countries constantly stockpiling yellow cake uranium, I had to agree to this.  You see, this young lady offered to forgive my outstanding debt if I would just accompany her to Women Without Men.  I know what you’re thinking, that old British drama by Elmo Williams where those bitches break out of prison?  At TBA???

Nope, apparently in Iran they also thoroughly enjoy remaking movies that don’t need to be remade.

See also: Akmhed Jafara’s unnecessary 2007 update of Tremors where Kevin Bacon’s character (played by Bijhan Dinijhad) is chased through the Iranian desert by giant Jewish sandworms trying to shake him down for some change.

Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Before last night, I personally had known very little about the film except that it was directed by somebody from Iran and apparently had something to do with that country in the 1950s.  I’ll give it to you straight: I didn’t even fucking know that Iran existed in the 1950s.  We arrived and I was incredibly pissed off to find out only a minute into the film that it was in fucking subtitles.  SUBTITLES.  How the shit am I supposed to concentrate on what is happening in a movie if I also have to be reading the whole time?  There is a reason that God invented movies and books separately.  If you don’t know what it is, you’re probably a student at Reed College.

I’m honestly trying to remember what happened during this movie, but for the life of me I can’t really recall.  I do remember several scenes of this dirt road that women walked down and it was supposed to be sad but hopeful at the same time (they call this “melancholy” in the movie biz).  Also, some of the cast were Communists and actually fucking had a portrait of Karl Marx up in their newspaper printing building.  Many of the cast members also sang in an odd sounding pitch and cadence that reminded me of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (the Elvis Presley of Pakistan).  There was a scene involving a string instrument that basically looked like a banjo made out of an elephant’s nutsack.  It was also not really in tune.

Here is a rundown, from what I gathered, of the plot:

  • Some girl’s brother thinks she should get married but she’s like, “Fuck that, I wanna listen to talk radio.”  He gets mad and starts yelling at her friend who looks like Frida Kahlo.
  • That bitch is in love with the brother, but he’s not into it.  Meanwhile, the radiophile girl jumps off a building and kills herself.  But she’s not really dead – you find this out a little bit later after the Kahlo chick digs her up out of the backyard (this is where people get buried in Iran).
  • Then an anorexic girl doesn’t like prostituting anymore so she takes a bath until she bleeds all over.  She walks down the sad road and ends up at this orchard that a fatter lady just bought.
  • The fat lady bought the orchard because she though her husband sucked dicks.  Oh, and she’s like secretly in love with a former flame who spends all his time fucking American girls.  But after tasting blonde pussy, you can bet your ass he’s def not gonna want her fur pie anymore.
  • The radio girl joins a Communist group and starts handing out newspapers and all these people are like marching and holding up signs and yelling in megaphones about how much they hate the British (Gawd, who doesn’t?).
  • Frida Kahlo walks down the road and lives at the orchard now, too.  So it’s kind of like an Iranian lesbian commune at this point and they decide they’re going to have a party and invite all of the prettiest people in Iran.
  • What they don’t know is that a coup was just staged and shit is totes fucked.  A bunch of army people show and and party for a while and then are like, “What’s up?”
  • Then the prostitute, who didn’t really ever talk or make me identify with her, dies.  The other two bitches are bummed.
  • The radio girl’s new Communist boyfriend stabs some motherfucker and then she kills herself again, but this time it works.
  • The screen goes black and that song from the beginning of the Lion King plays.

Was seeing it worth debt relief to the tune of $13,000 + interest?  I guess so.  But if you like your films with a little bit more romance and a whole lot more English, I’d say you should check out Cyrus starring John C. Reilly, Jonah Hill and Marisa Tomei playing now for only $3 at Laurelhurst.  Now that was a flick.

Oh, I’d also like to point out that the original Tremors film has an IMDB score of 7.2 versus Women Without Men‘s 6.4.

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