Wordsmith Foundry

I'm happy to announce that I am now a guest contributing writer to Wordsmith Foundry, a new blog about creative writing! My first article is in the link below:

http://wordsmithsfoundry.blogspot.com/2014/10/4-outline-writing-versus-dynamic.html?m=1

HalfAChicken.com - 10/7/14 - “Invisible Artwork” Hoax Successfully Trolls the Art World...But Not in the Way You Expect

Originally published on 10/7/14 at HalfAChicken.com
https://halfachicken.com/justinavalon/article/106

Oh man...the headline for this juicy bit of art news hooked me right from the beginning, but actually reading through it only made it juicier.

The above image is a doctored photo of an exhibit in Milan with the actual exhibit removed, courtesy of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). This was released as part of a hoax by New York-based “artist” Lana Newstrom and radio parodists Pat Kelly and Peter Oldring of This is That, the Canadian counterpart to America’s own satirical news network The Onion. The article that first launched this hoax went live a week ago, and can be viewed here:

http://www.cbc.ca/thisisthat/blog/2014/09/23/new-york-artist-creates-art-that-is-invisible/

Now, Kelly and Oldring have an infamous penchant for passing off parody and trickery as news, but for some reason, this latest ploy, which fabricated a story of an artist’s “invisible artwork” being bought up for millions of dollars, was actually believed to be real by other news publications. That’s right, online news networks such as Wealthy Debates and Barstool Sports immediately saw through the scheme of blank walls and canvases being passed off as art, yet legitimately believed people were actually buying them up! And who can blame them? It’s such an eccentric and stupidly ridiculous move that only a pretentious self-serving art snob with an account in Aspen would actually consider doing it. How could it not be true?

What’s interesting and endlessly amusing is that while Wealthy Debates and Barstool are talking shit about these alleged rich art collectors for spending money on literally nothing, I’m over here laughing at how seriously they’re taking this hoax story within a hoax story. I mean, how the fuck can you be half-gullible that you would see through the bullshit of one part of the story but not the whole thing?

The theory held by The Guardian in their response article to this latest hilarious development is that we as a culture just hate rich fuckers who are able to throw their money at anything. This hoax story was the perfect opportunity to take jabs at the wealthy art snobs, and these sites did so with gusto and in that respect have earned my applause. (Insert golf clap here).

In the end, however, I feel that the real winners here are the brilliant blokes at This is That for not only successfully trolling the art world with their Inception-style hoax-within-a-hoax, but for educating us on a very essential aspect of human existence, and that is the endless cycle of assholes talking shit about other assholes that pervades our communal existence. For as long as we band together, we will hate on each other together, for just about any little thing.

God bless you, Pat Kelly and Peter Oldring. May your wit be always sharp, and your audiences forever oblivious.

SOURCES

Canadian Broadcasting Corp. – http://www.cbc.ca/thisisthat/blog/2014/09/23/new-york-artist-creates-art-that-is-invisible/

The Guardian – http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2014/sep/30/invisible-art-hoax-lana-newstrom-cbc

HalfAChicken.com - 10/3/14 - Adventure Time show creator quits

Originally published on 10/3/14 at HalfAChicken.com
https://halfachicken.com/justinavalon/article/103

If you’ve never heard of Adventure Time before, just know that it’s the closest thing to an acid trip that the FCC will allow on a child-focused television network. It is generally described as a “surreal post-apocalyptic animated saga” as well as “the trippiest show on TV” (Strauss 2014), but really, words don’t do it justice. The bright color palettes, quirky and memorable characters, and juvenile-level antics and adventures can make you almost overlook the copious amounts of erratic and nonsensical shit that takes place. Almost.

Think of Adventure Time as a G-rated version of Ren & Stimpy…I use the term “G-rated” loosely here.

There’s really no way to properly describe Adventure Time to someone who has never seen the show. Everything from dimensional travel, parallel realities, convoluted plotlines, and the cast of characters’ deep-seated origin stories are explored the series’ 176 episodes, each of which is only 11 minutes long. It is the sort of sensory ass-kicking that needs to be experienced in order to be understood. It’s not like there’s any drugs or sex in the program, mind you. This is a show focused towards kids, after all. But with that in mind, the content can get pretty outlandish and downright disturbing at times.

…seriously, what the fuck is wrong with that bird?

In fact, the show delivers such a strong, well-written subliminal mindfuck that you would think its creator Pendleton Ward, who recently left the show, would have been forcibly checked into the nearest mental hospital due to a severe schizophrenic breakdown before he would leave (calm and collected) of his own accord.

But alas, none of that actually happened. The story is much simpler (and far less exciting) than that. Ward, who is mellow and introverted and just about the farthest thing from a psychopath as you can get, cited stress and exhaustion from trying to keep up with the growing magnitude of the show’s popularity as his cause for departure.

And who can blame him? Adventure Time is HUGE right now. “It’s a beast of a show,” Ward told Rolling Stone. “And the more popular it gets, the more the ancillary things – like the merchandise and games and everything – keeps getting bigger.” (Strauss 2014).

Sometimes merchandising can be a good thing though…=3

Tom Kenny, who voices the bubbly titular character on Nickelodeon’s Spongebob Squarepants and the misguided and narcissistic Ice King in Adventure Time, noted Ward’s weariness, which is particularly reflected in the character of the Ice King. “The way the Ice King feels [is] like he’s going mad and things are spinning out of his control,” Kenny tells Rolling Stone. “I’m sure Pen [Ward] has felt like he’s losing his grip on reality because he’s the arbiter of everything.” (Strauss 2014).

Ward himself seems to echo these sentiments. “[Like the Ice King, I have] a craving to be social and hang out with nice people and have them think I’m nice, which doesn’t make any sense to me.” (Strauss 2014).

A chest kick from Finn still doesn’t hurt as much as a chest kick from life.

However, fans of Ward’s work need not fret, for the ambitious animator still has plenty of projects up his sleeve, including writing an Adventure Time movie and creating an original video game, as well as dabbling in some cooperative projects with his friends in the form of a short called Animation Pals. Above all, though, Ward looks to do something that he will enjoy and get excited about without exceeding “the confines of what [his] brain can handle.” (Strauss 2014).

After overseeing the birth of nearly 200 episodes of kid-friendly, over-the-top mindfuckery, his brain has definitely earned a break.

This is your brain on Adventure Time. Literally.

SOURCES

Strauss, Neil. “’Adventure Time’: The Trippiest Show on Television.” 2 Oct. 2014. Rolling Stone. Web. 2 Oct. 2014.

Adventure Time cast of characters image – http://o.aolcdn.com/hss/storage/midas/177f08ad24bd8552db7c49d0cb15da44/200549717/2468603-38304-adventure-time-adventure-time-characters.png

Ren & Stimpy GIF – http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-E2uMuAXi4yo/UaIKSmVkrJI/AAAAAAAAAgk/4qNADG1e9n4/s1600/mansbestfriendgif.gif

Adventure Time bird image – http://i.ytimg.com/vi/NljxtaJv-68/hqdefault.jpg

Adventure Time girls image – http://cdn.trendhunterstatic.com/thumbs/adventure-time-styles.jpeg

Finn and Ice King image – http://www.gamrreview.com/media/images/adventuretime05-02049458617268569528109134959050.jpg

Brain Beast image – http://img2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20110727224727/adventuretimewithfinnandjake/images/c/c1/S1e4_Brain_Beast.png

HalfAChicken.com - 10/2/14 - Has Cirque du Soleil lost its touch?

Originally published on 10/2/14 at HalfAChicken.com
https://halfachicken.com/justinavalon/article/102

The Spell is Broken: Has Cirque du Soleil lost its touch?

With its penchant for death-defying acrobatic routines, grandiose visual flair, and overall vibe of whimsy and mystery, the famed fantastical French-Canadian feature of the Vegas stage known as Cirque du Soleil is truly a unique offering. I’ve watched quite a few Cirque shows now, and each show brings its own flavor to the table, from the oriental fire-themed Ka to the sensual and sexy Zumanity. Just about every major hotel on The Strip houses its own Cirque soiree, and you can literally spend all week watching all of them and never run out of things to see.

Or you can just watch Zumanity over and over again. Your call.

HOWEVER! It is inevitable that all good things must come to an end. Sure, you probably won’t feel it at first. You’ll hit the sublime Cirque show trifecta of KA, O, and Mystere and still be giddy as a schoolgirl. Zumanity will probably continue to titillate you for a few cold nights after you see it. Heck, maybe you’ll dust off the shiny glove and black jacket and get reacquainted with Michael Jackson at ONE…in a platonic, respectable way, of course. *AHEM*

C’mon Cirque, the trial was almost 10 years ago. LET IT GO.

But like every TV show you loved and watched, eventually it starts to get stale. Sooner or later, you’ll sit down to a more recently-released Cirque show and walk out thinking to yourself, Huh, that was just…okay. It will lack the “pop” and polish of the earlier shows you’ve seen. Or worse, it will leave you with a feeling of disappointed repulsion, kind of like the sequels to The Matrix (which many people, including myself, still deny the existence of).

Yeah, watching the sequels to The Matrix kinda feels like that. Only in your balls.

Let’s take a look at the last Cirque show I saw: Michael Jackson ONE. I’ve been a fan of MJ’s career since my dad showed his music to me back in the 90’s, and I’ll admit to trying to learn how to moonwalk because it looked so cool in the videos. However, I felt that ONE was a complete miss on Cirque’s part. It’s not that the show didn’t have its moments; the neon-lit suits dancing to “Billy Jean” in the shadows and the people moonwalking up and down the walls of the theater were actually pretty cool. But overall, there was nothing really making it more defined or memorable compared to other shows, unless you count the fact that they turned the lights down every time an acrobatic or dance routine started and attempted to use strobes and special effect lighting as their sole source of illumination.

Oh hey, the lights came back–…uh, I’d like them back off please.

ONE is an example of a disappointing plague of “not trying hard enough anymore” that seems to have spread rampantly among the showrunners of Cirque. While it is true that each show still has its own theme and sense of aesthetics, there are some that are clearly more creative and thought-out than others.

When you look at shows like O or Ka, they have this “big” feeling about them. The scenes fully encompass their themes of water and fire, respectively, and everything is done on a grand scale, from the giant complex acrobatics to the clever incorporation of their elements into the outfits and settings. You can tell that the people who made those shows knew exactly what they wanted and executed it beautifully.

In contrast, the newer shows don’t feel as polished. ONE felt like a hodgepodge of MJ music video clips that attempted to cover and sum up the King of Pop’s illustrious career, but instead came off as an elementary school art collage cobbled together by people who were never in the same room at the same time as each other. Zarkana’s aesthetic of “trippy magical circus” seemed a little redundant, since just about every other Cirque show is already inherently representative of a magical carnival-esque occasion while still having their own unique themes on top of that. (Although maybe Zarkana’s lack of a real theme is a theme itself, in which case bravo to the writers for actually being clever). And when watching the classical cinema-themed Iris, one can’t help but think that they took the entirety of their special effects and acrobatic equipment budget and put it towards making costumes via cobbling vintage outfits and spare camera parts together, the results of which should never have even left the concept art stage of production.

Plus, the stage design for Iris was H.P. Lovecraft-level horrifying.

I can’t tell if I should be laughing or frightened.

I know I sound like an old fart for saying all this, but the Cirque that I grew up loving had enchanted and awed me with its creativity and brilliance. Whoever is running the show nowadays has clearly tried to make things too hip, too current, too contemporary, and as a result, the Circus Under the Sun has trapped itself within a perpetual eclipse of mediocrity. Luckily for them, the solution is simple. Cirque can reclaim the magic it once had by going back to what it does best: embracing the story they’re trying to tell, doing it big, doing it epic, and never forgetting the whimsy and mystery that drew people to the show in the first place. I still hold on to the hope that my beloved Cirque will find its way once again, but until then, I’ll enjoy re-watching the 3 or 4 shows I actually do like.

Next article: the top 5 ways to keep those annoying brats off your lawn.

Sources

Zumanity image – http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/6I_rxW7iVUM/hqdefault.jpg

Matrix Revolutions image – http://cdn3.whatculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/001.jpg

Michael Jackson ONE images -
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2013/07/29/business/29jackson2/29jackson2-popup.jpg
http://lasvegas.showtickets.com/cdn/site/582x270-3.jpg

Iris image - http://www.seeing-stars.com/Images/Places/Iris-Stage.jpg

Clint Eastwood image – http://www.quickmeme.com/img/e4/e4e28c2873829c59f3d5f554ca7f7e3ec07018daf7fdb433d11d9a7585836590.jpg

HalfAChicken.com - 10/1/14 - Kimbra at The Bootleg Theater, Silver Lake, CA

Originally published on 10/1/14 at HalfAChicken.com
https://halfachicken.com/justinavalon/article/100

Hearing the name “Kimbra” probably won’t register anything of note in your head, unless you actually paid attention to the colorful and trip-tastic video for Gotye’s (one) hit song “Somebody that I Used to Know.” She was the decidedly less-freaky-looking one in this disconcerting still art come to life.

Remember when this song was actually a thing? Yeah, neither do I.

But regardless of whether or not Kimbra makes any blips on your musical radar, one thing we can all agree on is that there’s nothing better than a free show, and having even one sort-of-familiar-sounding artist on the bill is a very welcomed bonus. I got the opportunity to see Kimbra for free at the humble and hipstery hole-in-the-wall known as The Bootleg Theater this past weekend. This show marked the end of her residency at The Bootleg, and would feature songs from her latest album, The Golden Echo, which was released back in August.

To be honest, I walked into this show completely blind. I had no prior knowledge of what Kimbra’s music sounded like, and other than my rather presumptuous hypothesis that all her stuff would emulate that one Gotye song in some way, I had no real expectations for what I would hear. Still, this is why I go to local shows. LA is a rich cornucopia of art and culture; there’s always something to discover, good or bad. Chance favors the bold, and serendipity had thus far been a very rewarding mistress to me when it came to hitting up random venues to see bands I barely knew.

Well, as it turned out, my Gotye hypothesis was partially right, in the sense that just like watching Gotye’s freaky video, watching Kimbra perform was a sensory mindfuck from beginning to end.

If your idea of décor involves Technicolor skulls and bad TV reception…you just might be an indie artist.

Kimbra’s music is generally described as “jazz-inspired electropop” with influence drawn from Imogen Heap, Prince, Rufus Wainwright, and Mike Patton, among others. A very good playlist indeed, and seemingly nothing out of the ordinary about it. One of my concert compatriots even mentioned hearing her previous album Vows and saying that it sounded like “normal music,” whatever that means.

What we heard at this show, however, was a total “fuck-it-all” to any notions of radio-friendly commercial normalcy, delving into a realm of aural oddities and ambient white noise that threw us for a complete loop. For those looking for a crash course into the musical direction Kimbra took in The Golden Echo, the best way I can describe it is to imagine a vinyl player churning out psychedelic(er) remixes of Bjork songs down an empty sewer tunnel, with a cat providing accompaniment by blindly pawing at the keys of a broken grand piano. That’s sort of what it sounded like while Kimbra was playing. I don’t know if that was intentional or if the sound guy was mixing it badly or what. All I know is that whether it was out of mesmerized curiosity or flabbergasted confusion, Kimbra held my attention, which was probably the point anyways.

Actually, seeing this at the show would have been a huge improvement.

That’s not to say that it was completely unbearable to listen to. Actually, I found it to be quite the opposite; the layering of all the different sounds made for an interesting and developed “sound world” that really filled up the meager space of The Bootleg’s “Space Jam” theater, and Kimbra’s scatty and yipping vocalizations matched the playful energy she radiated as she skipped and danced around the stage. The crazy visual projections you see in the pictures above really helped to pull the performance together as well, turning the stage into a “living music video” of sorts, where the audience was not only witness to the experience, but a central part of the experience as well. All in all, it was surprisingly entertaining for what it was.

Looking back at it, the real crux of the concert’s shortcomings fell mainly upon our musical palettes. Most of the people in the audience were used to these sort of off-beat noise experiments, indicative of an underground scene that was known and enjoyed by only a select few. For them, this music was pure magic, filling them up with a strange primal energy that, combined with a little alcohol- and cannabis-induced inspiration, moved them to sway and dance and clap and get lost in Kimbra’s freeform, unstructured ambience.

These folks should start a club.

However, to us, the decidedly “mainstream-adjusted” listeners, this music was a little too “out there.” The lack of typical song elements such as structure and refrain made it hard to really attach ourselves to any particular moment in the set, and everything blended together into a continuous cacophony of unintelligible sound. The seemingly random noisemaking coming from Kimbra and her backing instrumentals hovered somewhere between sonically interesting and utterly pointless at times, and were it not for her physicality on stage, it would have been a very monotonous affair to sit through after your eyes adjusted to the LSD-like effect of the stage’s aesthetics.

Hey, illusory dragons have feelings too…

Overall, I would say that Kimbra’s performance was a triumph in regards to being original and making something that expressed nothing less than her own creativity, passion, and joy. After all, that is the essence of what makes an artist successful, and Kimbra succeeds flawlessly at this. I will caution anyone who is stepping into Kimbra’s world for the first time that she definitely not for everyone, and that her brief appearance in Gotye’s song does not do justice to the unique sound and experience that is her art. Neophytes would do well to enter this with a very open mind and forget everything they thought they knew about music. If you can get over the quirky and unconventional nuances of her sound and dig into the “experience” that is a Kimbra show, you’ll no doubt be tuned into one of the most promising and remarkable artists present in today’s underground music scene, a true diamond in the rough.

For the rest of us, we’ll content ourselves with that overplayed Gotye song. At least there’s a chorus we can sing along with.

Pop culture overload? Definitely. Funny? Debatable.

SOURCES

Gotye video pic – http://www.lucillezimmerman.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Gotye-Somebody-That-I-Used-to-Know-660x469_png_630x469_q85.jpg

Kimbra live show photos courtesy of Justin La Torre

Piano cat meme – https://catmacros.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/piano_cat.jpg

iTunes pic – http://cdn.someecards.com/someecards/filestorage/feel-profound-connection-workplace-ecard-someecards.jpg LSD cat meme – http://weknowmemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/no-i-havent-seen-your-lsd.jpg

Gotye Kanye meme – http://cdn1.smosh.com/sites/default/files/bloguploads/gotye-funny-kanye-cut-off.jpg