Somewhere between psychedelic escapism and our current absurdist political landscape lies Dan Deacon's new video Ultimate Reality. Featuring sequences from Arnold Schwarzenegger's classical period footage off Terminator 2, Total Recall and Conan the Barbarian, Deacon's upcoming release includes the below featured sequences, the second culled, as far as I was able to tell, entirely from Conan the Barbarian, perhaps the least flattering loin-cloth/nut-sack combo of the Governator's all too long and fruitful career. Steroid is bads for you, kid. It shrink your wee wee. Binge on creatine shakes instead. Cuz no one loves you if you can't crush soup cans between your pecs. Got it?
The big question for Deacon's Ultimate Reality in our mind (IMPOSE has a collective mind, also referred to as an ftp site), is whether it matters that a pile of meat turned the act of playing killing machines for Hollywood into such a successful enterprise that no one blinked when voting him into office, twice. Post-ironic? What the hell? Is our political system just another part of being entertained?
The video indulges fully in that iTunes-viewer split-screen acid haze rorschach test that promises seizures to unsuspecting old people and makes metal heads grumble the world round. It begs the question: why has this hippy resurgence stuck around for so many years? You could say our ongoing dependence on post-modern fetishizing of what's retro is the best form of escapism Americans could ever devise. You could also say drugs are fun and we don't want to talk about the war. Take it or leave Deacon's new piece for any political gestures, but the couple jet planes that appear through the pink haze to bomb a bridge near the two-minute mark sell me.
The video was made by Jimmy Joe Roche, who has collaborated with Deacon in Baltimore for five years. The final 40-minute long Ultimate Reality video will be released by Carpark in the winter.
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TOUR DATES
SEPTEMBER
02 Brooklyn NY New York New York Scavenger Hunt
06 Seattle WA The Vera Project
07 Portland OR Holocene
08 Chicago IL Hideout Block Party
12 Toronto ON Phoenix*^
13 Montreal QC La TuLipe*^
14 Boston MA Avalon Ballroom*^%
15 New York NY Webster Hall*^
17 Philadelphia PA Starlite*^
18 Baltimore MD 2640 Space*^
19 Washington DC Black Cat*^
20 Charlottesville VA Satellite Ballroom*^
21 Asheville NC Orange Peel*^
22 Atlanta GA MJQ Concourse*^
23 Hattiesburg MS Thirsty Hippo
24 Houston TX Walters on Washington
25 Austin TX The Mohawk
27 San Diego CA Epicentre*^
28 Los Angeles CA Echoplex*^ (TWO SHOWS)
29 San Francisco CA The Fillmore Auditorium*^
OCTOBER
04 Oberlin OH Dionysus Disco#$
05 Minneapolis MN First Avenue*~
06 Iowa City IA The Picador*
11 Saint Louis MO The Billiken Club
12 Grinnell IA Gardner Lounge- Grinnel+
19 Bennington VT Bennington College
20 Alfred NY Alfred University Knight Club
* = w/ Girl Talk
^ = w/ White Williams
% = w/ Simian Mobile Disco
# = w/ Health
$ = w/ Crime Novels
~ = w/ The Show is a Rainbow
+ = w/ These Are Powers
