Nietzsche said that existence can only be redeemed through art. I don't know what that really has to do with Dan Deacon and Jimmy Joe Roche’s collaborative video project Ultimate Reality (which screened to an enthusiastic crowd at the DD show last Sunday). What I do know is that Eric Grandy's negative review in The Stranger (mentioned by an irate Deacon at the concert) is almost totally off. Grandy adopts the posture that art can't really be fun--or at least that appears to be the central precedent missing from his argument.
"Just how much slow-mo, stroboscopic, mirror-image, split-screen, digitally psychedelicized Arnold Schwarzenegger can you take?" he asks. I don't know, maybe it's a difference in personality, but I can take it by the boatloads, especially if it's set to the throbbing soundtrack of a live drum duel with hilarious explanatory rolling credits read drunkenly by a sweaty scenester.
Grandy found little artistic merit in the performance's use of "footage from the Governator’s films, [which are] edited into a loose narrative that conflates his more macho roles (the Terminator, Conan) with those less so (Kindergarten Cop, Junior), in the hope of establishing a 'dominant pansexual ubermyth.' Two sets of scrolling intertitles confuse plot points from various films (even non-Schwarzenegger joint Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure) to create a story—involving time traveling, robots, a 'man-womb,' Bill and Ted’s history report—for all the unintelligible visual chaos."Whatever.
When you're packed in tight with a bunch of eager concertgoers, and starting to feel insane watching pyschedlic mirror images of a rainbow Terminator intercut with Arnold in labor from Junior, you start to wonder if maybe you are being given a special peak at 21st-century manhood--or the "dominant pansexual ubermyth."
Thanks to Sam for the excellent photos.
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