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more local art, and a bit of retro filmage

I caught acb's work being displayed as part of a collection of Fitzroy-themed art, last night. It stood up pretty well amongst photographs, mixed-media collages, paintwork and a few random objects, like the guy who had glasses filled with things like boxer shorts, computer parts, italian banknotes or what looked like hand-painted two-tone pharmaceuticals.

After that, he mentioned that they were showing some short films at Good Morning Captain over in Johnston St, including Kraftwerk's Autobahn, so we wandered over :

  • Devil's Toy - something from Canada which railed against the evils of skateboards, much like Reefer Madness (though I notice the IMDB says it was in French, so I guess ours must've been dubbed).

  • the effects of alcohol on the human body - from Finland(?), full of the odd, muddy colours and a particular style of cartoon-drawing that could've only come from the 70's (I remember a children's cook-book from back then that's just the same).

  • Autobahn - a bit trippy, with plenty of movement motifs, but more in the way of vague sexual references than driving cars...

  • the last, longer piece was a documentary on B-grade fast-film director Roger Corman (eg. Wild Angels, "hailed by European critics as 'a desperate cry from a fast-food culture'"), which included interviews with various people who'd worked with him before going on to bigger things, such as Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard (who was in a Corman film called Grand Theft Auto, of all things), Peter Fonda (Wild Angels, which apparently paved the way for Easy Rider ? and The Trip, which had a fabulous joke about "the living room"), David Carradine (on Death Race 2000 - "I tell you, that script was so wonderful"), Joe Dante, Jonathan Demme, etc. Jack Nicholson seemed to get a start with Corman, too (eg. a bucket of blood) though they didn't manage to interview him. Highlights were bits of the trailers they'd show occasionally - "Night Call Nurses - nurses with their own brand of therapy", or one of the guys' justifications for, I think, Caged Heat - "there's people doing illegal lobotomies, and we have to expose that." Interesting, and pretty amusing too.

* 11:41 * art