Website Update

Been real busy lately and just wanted to mention quickly that louismgrafix.com has been gradually receiving a face lift. Check it out. My web skills are ever improving.

Stanley “Air” Kubrick

Reebok’s brand new Omni Lite Pump sneakers inspired by “Full Metal Jacket” and “2001: A Space Odyssey” are a must have for Kubrick fans and/or sneaker fiends. More pics and info after the jump.

The End All & Be All (Top 100 Hip-Hop Albums of the 00′s)

We love lists don’t we? And the end of a decade is always a great time to make some. So I give to you, the Louis M. Grafix Top 100 Hip-Hop Albums of the 2000s. This list started as a top 50 and just kept growing. A few rules to be set out before we get into this. Rule #1: Only official albums are allowed to be considered. No mixtapes. Rule #2: No greatest hits compilations are allowed (e.g. Big Pun – Endangered Species) Rule #3: The album has to be released after January 1, 2000. While doing my research I came across a lot of lists that had Dr. Dre – 2001 in it. Just because the name of the album is 2001 doesn’t mean anything, it was released in 1999.

Latest Work

I am forcing myself to post something, anything, since it has been so long since my previous entry. So I am going to share some of the work I’ve been doing (professionally & scholastically).

your mac can now be a self-righteous backpacker

I recently setup my workspace at my place of full-time employment with a 30″ Apple Cinema Display and let me tell you… WOW!!! The best $1800 my company has spent, haha. Now if there was only a way I could spend more money on the Cinema Display.

Michael Jackson: 10 Greatest & 10 Most Overrated

Growing up in the 80′s with a father who loved music and an uncle who was in a band I spent a lot of time watching MTV and VH1, thus I was a pretty big fan of Michael Jackson. He is one of my first memories growing up. “The Way You Make Me Feel” was my favorite song and music video for quite some time. I also loved “Billie Jean” and “Beat It”. Then I remember watching the mini-series “The Jacksons: An American Dream” when it aired in 1992. I recommend anybody and everybody to watch this by the way, I’m sure it will be being aired a lot now. This further cemented my respect and appreciation of his music along with opening my eyes to the music of the Jackson 5.

Now as much as Michael was eccentric and out-there he was a genius and easily the greatest performer and dancer ever. I don’t know when we will ever see an icon of his magnitude again, if ever.

So stick around and see my countdown of The King of Pop’s top 10 greatest songs and his 10 most over-rated songs (as great as he was, he wasn’t perfect).

Redesigned Album Covers Part I

Was under the weather this past weekend which lead me to three things. One, watched some movies: Zodiac and A Beautiful Mind. Two, accepted a new freelance project designing a mixtape cover, which I will post here when it’s finished. Three is while working on the mixtape cover I thought how much I love album covers and decided to undertake a little pet project which will be on going (at least until I become bored with it). This project will be redesigning of classic Hip Hop album covers.

Summer Sunday

Another long absence from posting… this can not go on. I have a couple of top 10 posts in the works, so look for those coming soon.

In the mean time I bring to you an art gallery I stumpled upon this past weekend. Texas Firehouse is a gallery and performance space in Long Island City. It is housed inside of a 150 year-old firehouse which was the first firehouse in Long Island City, which in case you didn’t know, was its own city much like Brooklyn was before it became part of New York City.

I would of never found this place if it wasn’t for my new bike, which I recently purchased at Bike Stop in Astoria. This purchase was one of best things I’ve ever done. On my second ever ride in Queens I discovered a lot of cool things and got to take in the beautiful sites of New York City. Like this photo I took with my phone of the Hell Gate & RFK Bridges.

oscar results

I know it has been awhile since I’ve posted and I apologize to all my faithful readers – whomever that may be.

But if you saw my post back in late January with my oscar predictions then you might be interested to see how I faired in my picks.

As for the award show itself, not bad. Hugh Jackman did better than I expected, but that may not be saying much since I thought he would bomb. The opening number was entertaining but the tribute to the musicals was really really boring and quite horrible. The presentations for the actor categories was like getting your teeth pulled.

Enough of my stalling, on to the results.

As for my straight up predictions I got 9 out of the 24 correct. But if you go by my, who should win I got 11 correct. Which, of course, means the Academy is getting smarter.

They definitely got the best picture right, “Slumdog Millionaire” was the best film out of those nominated, but I’m pretty sure it was not the best best film of the year. This movie has received so much undeserving hype it is ridiculous. I saw all of the best picture nominated films except for “Frost/Nixon” which is on my list to see. I can say that “The Wrestler” in my opinion was better than “Milk” and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”.

“Slumdog Millionaire” won in a lot of categories it had no right winning. Most notably, Editing, Cinematography, Sound Mixing and Sound Editing. Those all belonged to “The Dark Knight”.

lions & tigers & zombies – oh my!

More than just a zombie/horror flick, Night of the Living Dead is an important piece of cinema history. I give you here the full-length feature, courtesy of Hulu and a commentary written by a guest author, which you can visit his blog, Skulls & Ice Cubes.

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD

(A Deconstruction)

Night of the Living Dead. It’s One of the most unsettling horror films ever produced. One could tell that George Romero really had a good time making it. However, whilst it remains a landmark horror film, there is a great deal of controversy among fans and reviewers alike when it comes to any political commentary contained in the film. ‘Was Romero really trying to make a statement pertaining to race in America?’ Some will say yes. Others will say no. The answer is really yes and no; and I’ll get to an explanation of that cryptic declaration in due time. But before I do, I’d like to bring to light an interesting aspect of NotLD which has all but gone unnoticed by reviewers and analysts: the Freudian structure of the super-ego, ego & id to Romero’s narrative

In order to view the film within this context we must closely examine an important, yet overlooked, element to the story: the house.

THE HOUSE – IT’S ALL IN YOUR MIND

As the philosopher Slavoj Zizek has demonstrated in his analysis of Hitchcock’s The Birds, the three levels of the edifice serve as a metaphor for Freud’s structure of super-ego, ego & id. There can be no overlooking this. In fact, the narrative to NotLD has a lot of similarities to the The Birds (sub textually, however, we have a far different story being told). So what we have is a house with three levels to it: the upper, floor and sub-levels. The upper-level represents the super-ego, the floor-level: the ego and the sub-level the id. Differing from Hitchcock in this instance we also have personages who represent the super-ego, ego & id.

We have Harry Cooper, the older married man who has holed himself in the sub-level. He is clearly associated with the id. The id is concerned with selfishness and self-satisfying agendas. It’s also ruled by the pleasure-pain principle and is what spurs on basic human drives like the need of food and sex. Then we have Tom, the younger unmarried man. Tom would be associated with the upper-level, which is where he has a heartfelt conversation with his girlfriend Judy as she prepares the molotov cocktails (the only scene in the film where any unconditional love is clearly expressed between any of the characters). Tom therefore represents the super-ego, the faculty which is concerned with spiritual goals and ideals (the super-ego is of course far more complex than this, but keep in mind we are referring to the super-ego only as it applies to the narrative of this motion picture). Importantly, the super-ego also works in contradiction to the id, as it is responsible for impelling people to act within what would be considered a civilized manner. You clearly see the contrast in personalities between Tom and Harry during the course of the film. They are in fact polar opposites. Harry is a rude, obnoxious and only concerned with himself. Tom is calmer and tries his best to remain courteous. Each of the men are also coupled with a female counterpart. Each seems to be a reflection of what is needed as a manifestation to equate to what each man’s represents. Judy, Tom’s girlfriend, is young, beautiful, sweet and submissive. Helen, Harry’s wife, is older, unhappy and constantly at odds with Harry.

This brings us to the third couple; Ben and Barbara. They are not an actual couple, they are only coupled by default. But before we get to Ben let us start with Barbara. She is an impotent character with no cognitive abilities at all. Her helplessness is quite stark and almost distracting as she is incapable of coming up with any rational decisions for herself. Relatively speaking, she’s a deer caught in the headlights. In fact, when Barbara first meets Ben he pulls up in front of the house in his automobile with his headlights blazing. Later the composition of a shot filmed by Romero has Barbara’s head super-imposed over the line of sight where a deer-head trophy is perched over the fireplace – giving her the appearance of having deer-horns; the message is clear. So this then in fact brings us to Ben. He represents the middle-level. Ben represents the ego. As Barbara is coupled with Ben, and she has no cognitive abilities whatsoever it is incumbent upon Ben to make the decisions for her.

The Ego makes up the part of the personality that is defensive, cognitive, and capable of making definitive decisions that are not based merely on gratification of the super-ego or id. As Freud said himself, ‘the ego represents what may be called reason and common sense.’ So to repeat, the ego is clearly expressed as the character Ben. The first words we hear Ben speak are to Barbara when he says, “It’s all right.” In a traumatic situation, such as a zombie apocalypse for example, it would be the ego’s job to placate the other faculties of one’s personality, and putting the reality of the situation into order so that a comprehensible solution out of the ensuing chaos can be deciphered. When we’re first seeing Ben he comes in and starts viewing his surroundings and interjects some rational thought for the first time. He’s worried about more of the zombies getting in. He wants to know if there is any key so that he can get more gas into his truck to make an escape before there are too many. He checks to see if the phone is working. Romero even has him tell Barbara “Let’s get some more lights on in this house,” a symbolic metaphor of shedding some cognitive reason onto the blackness of the unconscious stupor Barbara has been caught in. Ben takes the pro-active action of gathering tools and resources to barricade the house. He continuously flips on light-switches and deduces that the zombies are afraid of fire and tells Barbara to “keep calm.” Ben is obviously associated with the mid/floor-level of the house.

Ben’s actions counterbalance Tom & Harry who are already present in the sub-level, having holed themselves away from the ensuing madness above. This of course is at the suggestion of Harry, the emissary of the id. Harry is a man who’s only worried about the immediate needs of his family (metaphorically; the immediate instinct of trying to find a hole to stick his head in and hope everything will blow over, figuring taking any kind of a stand puts the self in immediate danger). This is poor strategy, and Ben/the ego knows it. Ben knows the soundest strategy is to remain where they are as it offers the opportunity to make multiple escapes if necessary. As the representation of the executive decision-making faculty, the ego, Ben essentially tells Harry off and sets up shop on the floor-level. In doing so he even convinces Tom/super-ego that it would be best to stay out of the basement. So Tom/super-ego is the one who goes upstairs to help Ben/ego with the television and already gains the false hope of a rescue party. Harry/id, wants to hear none of it. He wants to stay in the basement. It’s a very fascinating discussion this group of three men have considering the dire situation they’ve been caught up in through no fault of their own. They have a debate as if it’s one mind weighing the positives and negatives of where it would be best to remain. It’s filmmaking on the highest of levels, as it remains utterly tense and entirely human all at the same time.

HARRY COOPER/id: “The cellar is the safest place!…You’re really crazy, you have a million windows up here. You’re going to make them all strong enough to keep them out huh?…The cellar, there’s only one door… just one door, that’s all we have to protect. Up here, with all these windows, why we’d never know where they were going to hit us next!”

TOM/super-ego: “Down in the cellar there’s no place to run to (a notion Ben has already convinced Tom of). I mean, if they did get in there’d be no back exit. We’d be done for. We can get out of here (the floor-level) if we have to. Now we have windows to see what’s going on outside. But down there with no windows, if a rescue party did come, we wouldn’t even know it.”

HARRY COOPER: “But the cellar is the strongest place.”

It takes Ben/ego to come up with the final decision.

BEN/ego (while still looking out the window significantly enough): “The cellar is a death trap.”

Harry/id still wants nothing to do with this. He is not going to leave the safety of his cellar. Ben/ego tells him straight out; “Go down in your damn cellar! Get out of here.” He wants him out of sight, and more importantly, out of mind. Harry wants to take the girl (Barbara) and supplies back down with him (again the id is where the sex drive & pain-pleasure principle is found, so this expressive desire of Harry’s is not coincidental). Still Ben/ego isn’t having any of it and he supercedes Harry:

Ben/ego: “Now get the hell down in the cellar. You can be the boss down there. I’m boss up here.”

THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS – ROMERO’S AMERICA

Now let’s sink our teeth into the big controversy many casual viewers have when it comes to this film.

Did George Romero consciously cast a black actor in the role of the main protagonist? I have not read very much into the making of NotLD, so I am sure those who have are in a far superior position to confirm this, but I am of the opinion that the answer to this query is: Yes, absolutely Romero consciously cast a black actor in the role of the central character in his picture. Remember that as the film is opening and we see Johnny’s car driving through the cemetery the picture lingers on an American flag that’s been posted by a grave in the foreground. Romero is telling us that this film is going to be a commentary on American society as he sees it. The fact that it’s a flag in a graveyard tells you the picture he’s going to present is not going to be pretty. So NotLD is more than just a commentary on race. Yes, the racial tension in America at this time was at an all-time high, but in the late 60s we also had the escalation of the Vietnam war and the epic counter-cultural clash between the conservative vs liberal-minded hippie and yippie thinkers bombarding the airwaves everyday: Young American soldiers were being shipped home maimed and slaughtered, anti-war protests and demonstrations that would erupt in violence – Robert Kennedy’s assassination that summer. It was all a shock to the system. The national psyche was traumatized unlike it had ever been before that time. It was almost something like a house under attack by a horrific outside force, perhaps something like flesh-eating zombies (the perfect metaphor as we shall see). And with all of this going on we also had Martin Luther King’s assassination while the Civil Rights movement was still in full-swing after a generation of images seeing blacks brutalized by police and having ravenous maltreated dogs sicked upon them by inhuman police forces which were to be found throughout the southeastern states for the most part.

Listen to the radio broadcast that Ben puts on. It’s most revealing. It goes on to state that, “These are the facts as we know them: There is an epidemic of mass murder being committed by a virtual army of unidentified assassins. The murders are taking place in villages, cities, rural homes and suburbs with no apparent pattern or reason for the slayings. It seems to be a sudden general explosion of mass homicide.”

This could easily be a radio report describing what was going on in Vietnam and on the home front. The use of the term village denotes the atrocities going on in Vietnamese villages during the war. At home we had assassinations as well as the murder of civil-rights leaders like the Kennedy bros., King and even men like Medgar Evers who just five years earlier had also been assassinated. Let us also not forget the blacks lynched by mobs (which was still going on in the 50s and 60s) as well as civil rights workers themselves who were murdered (see the history behind the story Mississippi Burning).

The radio broadcast continues:

“…We have some descriptions of the assassins. Eyewitnesses say they are ordinary looking. Some say they appear to be in a kind of trance. Others describe them as being kind of…”

Here the radio transmission scene cuts away to Ben looking out the window and seeing more zombies approaching – they look like they can be anybody’s neighbor. Which I believe is precisely the point Romero is trying to make. But there is still more to the broadcast:

“…so at this time there is really no way of knowing what to look for and guard yourself against…Reaction from law enforcement officials is one of complete bewilderment at this hour. So far we have been unable to determine that any kind of organized investigation is yet underway. Police, sheriff deputies and emergency ambulances are literally dead with calls for help. It can best be described as mayhem…”

All of this goes on while Ben sets up a chair to set aflame outside of the house using a makeshift torch out of white drapes he tears from a window. With the radio message that was just aired on in the background, what Ben does is very reminiscent of a sort of KKK ritual in reverse and stimulates the subconscious mind all the racial issues that had plagues the US up until that point.

The shocking finale of the film includes the death of Ben at the hands of a white lynch mob. This death is preceded by a montage of photographic stills that are eerily reminiscent of history books which deal with the racist past of America. It’s one of the more graphic sequences of NotLD in fact-meat hooks and all. Now someone who just wants to look at this sequence at face value, and ignore the time and place the film was made and give George Romero no credit whatsoever as an artist can easily say, “There is no racial element in this film at all. It wasn’t a lynch mob who shot Ben, but a group of men out to kill zombies. Therefore, Ben’s death was an accident.” But George Romero’s film is far deeper than a simple exhibition of marauding zombies. Images, symbols, motifs, they are all meant to stimulate the sub conscience of the viewer. The burning chair, the all-white lynching scene, the montage, they were all designed in such a way to strike the viewer at that subconscious level. So of course Ben was black. This was all just one aspect of the many statements Romero was making. But as we already know Ben to be a symbol of the human ego as well as martyrs of the civil-rights era, on the whole Ben represents all that’s in contrast to that which we might refer to as ‘the establishment.’ So we can extrapolate Romero’s metaphor to transcend issues of black vs. white.

And while we had innocent people in South East Asia being murdered in the millions, innocent American soldiers being slaughtered and maimed by the thousands, innocent American civilians being murdered and assassinated on the home front, we had a nation of zombies who for the most part (I say for the most part only, as there were many activists who would sacrifice their lives in the future years in an effort to stand up against these outrages; see Kent State) sat by and let such atrocities continue. They simply ‘ate up’ whatever propaganda their media fed them. They took the propaganda at face value. All while they consumed whatever the newest material possession was they were told they should go buy. It all contributed to the horrendous global death machine. Remember that American flag in the cemetery during the opening sequence? Might it seem a bit more appropriate now?

NotLD as a film is absolutely nothing short of a shot across the bow of the monolithic edifice known as market capitalism (as opposed to his masterpiece Dawn of the Dead which was a direct hit in the critiquing of such an ideology). NotLD is not so much an argument against capitalism as it is more so a reflection of what it has produced. So within the film zombie was the perfect metaphor. What is the only way to kill the zombie? Shoot it in the head – another metaphor of intellectual stimuli. In this film one can view the shooting of a zombie in the head as a way of awakening it from it’s intellectual slumber.

ROMERO – THE ESOTERICIST

Consumption; it is the act to consume. The one thing which made NotLD stand apart from other films of this genre was the graphic and nightmarish portrayal of cannibalism. Even today the scenes still stand up relatively well. Just imagine what audiences in 1968 felt. But up until Romero’s NotLD, zombies were never known for cannibalism as far as popular culture went. It was a genre-breaking stroke of artistic genius to portray graphic acts of cannibalism as plot-telling device used by Romero, as it was such an appropriate critique of a mindless capitalist American society in general. There is no getting around this. You can agree or disagree with the point being made. But what you cannot do is disagree that this is the point that Romero is trying to make. You cannot sugar coat it. That being said, although the idea of the dead feasting upon the living as the apocalypse dawns was new to audiences in the 1960s; it is not as alien a concept as one might think. In Christian theology for example, it is said that the dead will rise from the grave at the end of the world. There is no cannibalism involved of course (although it is interesting that good Catholics are told to eat the body and drink the blood of their savior). So this brings us to our final point – the darker ancient occult theme esoterically embedded into the narrative of the film.

George Romero got this idea of the dead rising from the grave to feast upon the living from the most ancient of stories. Many have probably heard of it at one point or another, but few have read it. I am speaking of the 5000+ year-old Sumerian poem the Epic of Gilgamesh. In this poem there is a disturbing threat made by the all-powerful goddess Ishtar/Inanna after she is insulted by the king Gilgamesh. Ishtar/Inanna wants to release the bull of heaven (you know this bull as the constellation Taurus) to kill Gilgamesh. Only the god Anu can release the bull, and he refuses her. So Ishtar/Inanna is even more furious. In her rage she makes a bold declaration. She threatens to “unleash the dead from the underworld so that they can feast upon the living” (Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet VI). This is the inspiration behind the notion of the dead being reanimated in order to eat the living seen in Romero’s Dead films. How do we know for sure? Well remember that the goddess Ishtar/Inanna has always been associated with the planet Venus. Hence, it was the space probe from the planet Venus which reentered Earth’s atmosphere that led to the dead being brought back in the story according to the television reports.

What does this connection mean exactly? It’s hard to say. I don’t know enough about George Romero to tell you that he’s a religious man, or a man who believes in karma, or anything at all in regards to his spiritual beliefs. Perhaps he doesn’t have any. But NotLD is a dark dark story, with symbols of death everywhere (the trophy heads in the living room of the house, the one-eyed corpse at the top of the stairs in the house, cemeteries, etc.) So when Romero includes an ancient Sumerian prophecy as the main crux to his plot for his film which serves as an abstract reflection of American society, just exactly what else is he trying to tell us?

Do we even want to know?