susan moon

(via https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0cm9T41ETwHWpGMruHgfXp?si=I5_3_HKSQ2SHyEOX812xDQ)

Originally published by Melted Magazine. See it here

Half-Russian, New York-based synthpop artist Shura explores connection, queer love, and musical growth in her sophomore LP 'forevher,' set to release this fall. Following her first project, 2016's 'Nothing's Real,' an indie pop LP that revealed the anxious side of vulnerability and unrequited love, the new record takes a new, decidedly soulful direction. Saxophone-tinged "BKLYNLDN" showcases her musical influences, which include Prince, The Internet, and Minnie Riperton. The project's first single, "religion (u can lay your hands on me)" is a fun, playful track that compares sex to religion while toying with innuendo. Shura and director Chloe Wallace cleverly use the strengths of the artist's vantage point in the song's video, inspired by the religious iconography of HBO's 'The Young Pope.' Walking the line between romanticism and '80s nostalgia, the clip reveals a perspective on love where weakness and transgression are necessary strengths. The LP, set to drop on August 16th via Secretly Canadian, features co-production from Joel Pott, Jona Ma (Jawar Ma), and Will Miller (Whitney), as well as additional vocals from artists Rosie Lowe, Kerry Leatham, and Reva (Nimmo). 'forevher' expands Shura's stance on queer desire, don't miss the release party at Music Hall of Williamsburg on October 23rd. - Susan Moon

If you want to know the future of film, first look at the direction of technology. That’s what filmmaker Sean Baker did when writing his feature Tangerine. Though his intention wasn’t to experiment with shooting styles or really “push the tech envelope,” Tangerine was shot entirely on 3 iPhone 5s’s with just the help of a steadicam and a few lenses, a choice made for budgetary reasons.

After being approached by Duplass Brothers productions (owned by Mark and Jay Duplass; you may know Mark from Safety Not Guaranteed or Skeleton Twins, and Jay from the beautifully written Transparent Amazon original series), Baker started on his script. As Baker’s fifth film, this is one thats truly pushed his career into the public eye. He’s known for making labor films, such as his 2004 film Take Out which told the story of an illegal Chinese immigrant late on payments for smuggling debt or his 2008 Prince of Broadway about a New York street hustler who sells knock-off brands and finds out he has a son. Like Baker’s previous work, Tangerine centers itself around underground labor but has a slightly different take. It was at an LA LGBT center that Baker met Mya Taylor and Kitana Kiki Rodriguez, both of whom were once sex workers in Hollywood and are the transgender actresses of Tangerine. What does that mean for the film? Well for starters, it’s closer to home for its actors than we might think and all the more authentic because of it. But it also means that it’s more than “a film about prostitutes” to our culture; instead it’s a statement on the American sex working industry, the film industry’s use of actors, and what American audiences actually want to see on their TV screens (not what producers think they want).

Tangerine starts out with two trans sex workers, Sin-Dee Rella and Alexandra, sitting at a Hollywood donut shop on Christmas Eve. Sin-Dee Rella, an orangey brunette with a feisty know-it-all attitude, has just gotten out of jail. Alexandra, her dark-haired, level-headed friend joins her to celebrate with donuts and juice. Unfortunately, Alexandra accidentally breaks the party mood with the news that Sin-Dee’s boyfriend and pimp Chester has been cheating on her with a straight female worker of his. “He cheated on me with a fish?!”she yells out. Furious and appalled, Sin-Dee storms out on a mission to get revenge: find her, do something to her, find Chester, do something to Chester (and not necessarily in that order). Alexandra, of course, always the dutiful friend, joins for the ride and her story gets interweaved in between. She passes out flyers for her performance coming up that night, gets into a small public dispute with a cheap customer, and spends some time with an Armenian cab driver named Razmik, a likeable but mixed morals character, as he runs his taxi through a car wash.

Eventually, Sin-Dee finds who she’s looking for, a scrawny young blonde Dinah, in the back of a brothel at a motel. “You didn’t have to Chris Brown the bitch!” Alexandra says at the beaten sight of her. Meanwhile, we see more of Razmik’s story as we follow him home where his family members are watching an Armenian program and chatting around in worn pleather chairs. Here, we meet his stereotypical bossy mother-in-law and young pretty wife and daughter. Back to Sin-Dee, we see her drag poor Dinah out by the head and abuse her through the streets of Hollywood. The two trudge onto a bus before arriving at a bar to watch Alexandra perform a song: a scene done exceptionally well visually between the velvet curtain surrounding Alexandra (clad in pearls and an off-shoulder dress) and the sparse casual bar audience sitting in their twinkly lit wooden booths.

As the film continues, we watch the unlikely threesome (the cheated, the cheatee, the supportive friend) head back to the donut shop [we saw in the first scene] to find Chester. There he is in all his glory: hat, weird font tattoos, navy bandana around the forehead, baggy Faded Glory jeans with the black wifebeater tucked in. The public dispute that occurs eventually ties hilariously with Razmik, his mother-in-law who followed him, and Razmik’s wife and young daughter. Call it a more realistic take on Keeping Up With the Kardashians.

Razmik leaves with his family and is left to question what he’s doing and what now, given what trouble he’s caused for his family. Chester breaks some surprise news of his own to Sin-Dee, leaving her more shocked and speechless than we’ve ever seen her. That said, the film closes sweetly with a quiet scene of Sin-Dee and Alexandra, the two best friends, sitting together peeling off urine-soaked clothes in a laundromat.

The film does well in maintaining its story structure. Given that it already attracts a lot of attention for its use of iPhones as an “experimental” or “indie” film, sticking to the movie mold can get people to not pinpoint every unusual moment in the story to its technology. Despite people’s turnoffs when it comes to the three-act structure, it’s worked for a reason and it’s what people are used to seeing, so using a traditionalist method makes it easier to be pulled into this movie and forget about the hype.

Likewise, Baker didn’t play around too much with his cinematography, keeping it simple with over the shoulder shots, wides, close-ups, and whatever served the scene. This is also important in that it lets viewers see what’s going on instead of think about the film’s mechanics and therefore be outside of and not pulled into the film. While some iPhone filmed films could work well with more artistic and creative shots, that isn’t Baker’s style: he wants people to pay attention to the concepts and subject matter more than he wants to be known as a cinematic storyteller. Because of that, we’re able to leave the movie talking about normalizing trans and other orientations on our screens and the all too real American sex industry we seem to be so hushed up about. “Out here, it’s all about our hustle, and that’s it,” Alexandra says, and rightly so. In addition, the film’s authenticity with art direction and on-location shooting makes it feel so real and pure that you can practically feel the stained carpets of the brothel, smell the smoke in the sports bar, and feel the grime of Sin-Dee’s favorite donut shop/Chester’s “office.” It’s a hard reality that makes you pinch your nose but you don’t even consider looking away.

Maybe it was the timing of when I watched World of Tomorrow, in an IFC movie theater set up for thirty but filled with one, forcing me to feel incredibly alone while I watched it but with a sense of “together-alone” because that’s all we are, alone together. But that doesn’t change the fact that no matter where or when you watch this film, it’s ability to reach its viewer is more than likely to be strong. It’s classic Hertzfeldt in that way, bold and persistent, slightly in your face but always genuine. It might make you uncomfortable if “about life” movies aren’t your thing, but it’s short, smartly timed, and comedically light hearted enough to balance out the heaviness of its subject matter. Really, the four-year old voice makes all the difference. Watch it on Vimeo for a $3.99 rental or on Netflix where it’s streaming free if you’re not paying for your own account. Or you could look it up illegally but it could fuck up your computer, and I’m just saying that because that happened to me once. However you watch it, I hope you do. It’s a movie that lingers with you for days and at random moments when you think you’ve forgotten about it, but that’s because it’s a movie about living. There’s only so much we can forget before it forces us to stop ourselves.

If you’ve seen any of Don Hertzfeldt’s work before, the first thing you probably saw was Billy’s Balloon. Small children are attacked by balloons. Or if you didn’t see that, maybe you saw one of his shorts from Rejected or maybe even all of them: a collection of poorly made shorts that are rejected by advertising agencies. They all suck from a marketing perspective since belittling a company you want to work for’s product won’t get you the job, much less sell the product, but that’s the point. Hertzfeldt’s work is characterized by black humor, surrealism, absurdist ideas, and the bigger philosophical ideas, the “why are we here and where am I going?” concepts. It’s all told through an old school 16 mm lens shooting stick figure drawing after stick figure drawing, a style that’s characterized Hertzfeldt’s animations and made his stories reach an international audience. I never would have thought drawing the stuff we were told would not pass as human anatomy would be so globally effective, but I guess that’s why I like it.

World of Tomorrow is Hertzfeldt’s most recent work to date. It’s a 17-minute animation that’s an upgrade from his stop-motion shorts of yesterday with their digital production and dreamy watercolor backdrops. His trademark stick figure characters are still there, voiced by illustrator Julia Pott and his then-four-year old niece. It features a young girl named Emily and her third-generation clone from the future, making World of Tomorrow Hertzfeldt’s first sci-fi film. You could argue his last feature It’s Such a Beautiful Day was actually his first sci-fi, with its touches on questions of time, space, illusion, and reality, but World of Tomorrow is much more direct in its approach. It explores topics of time travel, the limitations of human invention, and artificial versus actual flesh and bone human life, told with the juxtaposition of a robotic British clone’s voice against a young girl’s lively one. The film is full of juxtapositions, and that’s why it works. It’s a film about things adults like to think about and read books on, and college students go ham writing thesis papers on, but it’s told in the most elementary way possible to someone who has no idea what the big fuss is about.

Perhaps the first thing one might notice when listening to The Cocteau Twins is that the language Fraser is speaking sounds like a language we don’t know but certainly should. The band’s influences are uncertain, but I hear Siouxie and the Banshees, Birthday Party, and Bauhaus. Sounds that are essential to making shoegaze music a genre that rejects mainstream pop like its precursors and therefore a movement that focuses on introspection, independence, and freedom. The song has its own sense of determination, held together by Fraser’s looping voice, and the band’s writing that make the Cocteau Twins futuristic for its time. Its reliance on guitar as rhythm, vocals especially, and dancing swells, makes the song stronger. The song’s aesthetics are colorful, hopeful, vibrant, punk, and dreamy all at the same time. Colors pulse and swell with the keyboard drone, and pale icy blue dips into the song like soft watercolor droplets into a pool with the song’s simplistic guitar line. The song’s derivativeness can be heard even today, with the sweetness of Fraser’s voice lingering years after the project’s creation.

Enter the world that is Daniel Clowes’ Ghostworld, a world that sweeps you off your feet and takes you back to all of your first teenage experiences and initial stages of self-loathing (before it became a normal thing). If you aren’t familiar with any of Clowes’ work, Ghostworld is Clowes at his most relatable. If his first graphic novel Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron (1993) is his 50s/60s kitsch fascination and Lynchian mind exposed, Ghostworld is his ode to youth.

Clowes’ work consists of a plethora of colorful illustration, comics, graphic novels, and screenplays, both enchanting to look at and gritty in taste. Think metal braces, short mustaches, pimples and panties, blank stares, and making love to fish. Whatever it may be, each has his trademark touch of Clowes: bizarre alterations of reality, strange happenings, enticing but tragic characters, bits of imagination, meditations on life, and how weird it is to be a person. It’s somehow the spaciness and strangeness of his work that makes it feel closer to life rather than farther from it.

Ghostworld is actually a compilation of several chapters Clowes did for a solo anthology volume of comics called Eightball in 1989. Eighteen were issued in total for the Eightball series, with Ghostworld comprised of issues 11 through 18. On the back of its first paperback edition, Clowes summarized: “Ghost World is the story of Enid and Rebecca, teenage friends facing the unwelcome prospect of adulthood and the uncertain future of their complicated relationship.” And so it is. It follows the narrative of over talkative, smart-mouthed Enid and her softer but just as snarky best friend Rebecca in their misadventures after high school, not quite teen, not quite adult. But bigger than that, it’s a story we know all too well of trying to figure out just exactly what our story is.

Readers may wonder what the importance of a graphic novel like this one is outside of its cultural context. Comic book fans tend to flock to it for its depth and I might, add the minimalist visuals. There’s a certain restlessness that’s led to a burgeoning personal interest in looking to visual art for literal representation of issues that women truly know. Ghostworld for obvious reasons has an appeal for the way it frames moodiness, sadness, joy, and nostalgia. If hit novels fill the girls-next-door stereotype, comics are the boys playing on omnichords in their garages, a colorful, aggressive subculture. More simply, the story is right there in front of you. Its essence is a storyboard all the way through its core. Comic books are where in my search for new and exciting literature, I laugh the most and cry and grit my teeth. This is where stories tug hearts, and the freshest writing is spun.

Ghostworld in fact has a movie version, released in 2001 from a Terry Zwigoff-Daniel Clowes collaboration. It stars actresses Thora Birch (American Beauty, Anywhere but Here) and Scarlett Johansson (everything) as Enid and Rebecca. Both play the egocentric, lost victims of society beautifully in this slightly altered version of the comic, which did well critically in its initial screening at the 2001 Seattle International Film Festival but received lower than average audience recognition. Despite its limited commercial run and box office success, critics praised the film for its believable characters, strong performances, and relatable, true story. Rightly so, it was nominated for several awards by the Academy, Chicago Film Critics Associations,  AFI, and others. And while the differences between the comic and the film are there, the movie is still stronger and more touching than your average film. The movie falls short of truly capturing the aimlessness and mystery of the comic, but that’s a difficult task to even know how to begin. How can you get across the feeling of floating and how bizarre reality is to a viewer?

After Zwigoff and Clowes wrote the screenplay, they approached Brazilian cinematographer Affonso Beato who carefully studied the color and style of the comic to create a purposefully oversaturated aesthetic. It was meant to recreate “the way the modern world works where everything is trying to get your attention at once.” Zwigoff likewise focused on fluid, lingering shots and intentionally chose to portray an empty city and streets to capture the comic’s timeless, spaceless feel. “It captures this weird feeling of alienation in the endless modern consumer culture,” Clowes said.

While the visuals are enchanting and colors engaging, its Clowes’ writing that stands out. Of course, it’s the actors who carry the responsibility of delivering the writing (and what a beautiful job they do), but it’s on the writer to know what lines to give them and how to carry the story that follows. Clowes certainly knows, with the script kept as closely as possible to the comic and character relationships and story progression adapted for the shortcomings of movie writing. He times it all well. But most importantly, he keeps the same awkward, annoying, lovable characters in the movie as in the comic, and that’s why it works. I believe what was on the screen just as much as I believe what I read. That’s the hardest thing to do.