The sixth edition of Fingered Media’s biannual DVDzine sat pretty on my coffee table in its purple canvas pouch for a good two weeks before I got around to watching it — mostly because I knew that I couldn’t get away with letting it play in one window while juggling emails, Gchat, Facebook, and Twitter elsewhere. Having successfully set aside an hour or so yesterday evening to watch it from start to finish, I am reminded that devoting your complete an undivided attention to something — here, a spotlight on the art and music of a particular generation in a particular time and place — can leave you feeling much fuller than scattering your attention between one here and now and a hundred theres and thens, as people of this century are wont to do. Following previous sojourns into the cultural nether-regions of Los Angeles, Montreal, Mexico, and the Bay area (among other North American vicinities), videomaker Harrison Owen (and Fingered media main-man) turns his anthropological mind’s eye on Philadelphia, whisking us through galleries, DIY concert venues, image portfolios, and even the interior of one artist’s own home (Megan Remy of U.S. Girls).
Co-curated by artist Damien Weinkrantz, DVDZine #6 is much more show than tell. Rather than talk us through every step of the journey, Owen focuses on evocative combinations of sound and image — using a swampy electro-acoustic vignette by Mincemeat or Tenspeed, for example, as the “score” for a montage of fantastical monsters by Christopher Klein. Ultimately, this approach can only leave us with a sense of the extent to which the two seem to go hand in hand in this particular cross-section of the Philadelphia underground, with harsh noise and puffed-up cartoon satire swinging jubilantly on the same high voltage wire.
Those of us for whom Philadelphia represents nothing more than a destination on a MySpace calendar will get a sense of what it might actually be like to live and breathe and sweat inside this sweltering backyard neon fantasia. We hang with Megan Remy on her front porch as she reminisces about being paid $100 a night to cook dinner for a rich glassblower, then catch a glimpse of a Kung-Fu Necktie poster on the ground as she gives us a tour of her bedroom recording studio. We behold the slant of the light at a musty basement show, and marvel at how strangely familiar it all seems. What’s the use of meta-narratives, anyway? Philadephia feels so vivid here we can almost smell it through the screen.
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