#47: "someone's been eating from the friendship cake"
Welcome to issue #47 of THIS NEWSLETTER CANNOT SAVE YOU, a semi-regular sipping at the firehose of short films, music videos, and video artworks with durations under twenty minutes or so that modern culture-at-large generates to bemuse us until fate catches up. Greetings to those of you joining us via Burning Shore by Erik Davis. Please make yourselves at home.
Sometimes these opening remarks contain brief personal updates, but since I have none this issue, here instead is a brief message from the queen of the universe.
Okay, let's jam.
Scottovision
"L.A. On Acid" (2023) - EDM artist Dillon Francis commissions some pretty funny music videos; for instance, his video with Flux Pavilion for the track "I'm The One" is deliriant-class silly. For his newest video, he enlists Diplo in the role of "feeds Dillon Francis a chicken nugget soaked in LSD" and the insanity unfolds from there. Eric Wareheim costars as the chef in a kitchen of mayhem. Directed by Funny or Die alum Parker Seaman.
"Casino Of Earthly Delights" (2019) - Surely you can spare a couuple minutes for an animated tour of "the southeast’s premiere entertainment complex," Handsome Paulie's Casino of Earthly Delights. Look for the unmarked exit near the billboard that says "JEEZ" and follow the three geese flying in formation through the portal to the parking lot. There you'll be captivated by the ethereal dancers and unnatural buffet tables revealed by this surreal and supremely well-voiced animated film which premiered as an Adult Swim SMALL. If you want more after your visit, creator Mark Zamlinsky ("a writer and a laser show attendee") steadily expanded this into a nine-minute version in part by adding a quest narrative to the proceedings.
"90s Sitcom according to AI" (2023) - A towering achievement in the increasingly vital genre of "[some aspect of popular culture] according to AI." But whoever's steering this one isn't playing the premise straight, although the 90s elements are spot on. The sitcom's opening credits (that's all we get, sadly) are infested with extras that crawled out of the uncanny valley and burrowed into the background, always watching, always lurking. The creator's channel, Afraid 2 Sleep, features more "otherworldly horror and sci fi" developed using Midjourney and Runway Gen2.
"The TOBOS" (2023) - You see a lot of Teletubbies parodies when you work my beat. (I'm talking at least three.) This is the only one I've seen in which one of the weird little monsters develops an existential crisis about its place in the world, as represented in part by the black ooze periodically leaking out of it. Turns out that stealing bites from the friendship cake is no substitute for a genuine connection with the other little monsters in the neighborhood. This deceptively gentle satire is an early success from director & animator Tobias Rud.
"From Beyond" (2022) - The innocuous title of this short film belies its steadily unfolding cosmic horror. Director Fredrik S. Hana delivers a chilling and far-reaching story about "the day mankind was given the opportunity to extend its hand and politely greet the unknown," only to learn the unknown isn't much for etiquette. It's presented as archival/found footage and leans on practical and in-camera effects to create a believably harrowing depiction of dark times on planet Earth.
"Top 5 Animation Containers" (2019) - Imagine a world in which containers as a category of object were animated in popular media so frequently that an explainer video helpfully ranked the top five of these containers. Then imagine these top five containers were alive out in the world and utterly deranged. Now you're in the ballpark of this masterpiece by Ben Wheele, who also brought you the eloquent animated PSA, Cigarette Warning.
"HUM हम (We/Us)" (2023) - NOWNESS recently presented this lush, evocative fashion film by describing it as "a dystopian, tropical fairy tale." It's a gender fluid riff on the Cinderella template and ostensibly a showcase for the brand Little Shilpa. As designer Shilpa Chavan notes, it's also "a purely cinematic experience, where atmosphere, sound, and imagery combine to create deeply unsettling spaces within the stark storyline." But although its story hooks are necessarily thin, the film earns an emotionally upbeat conclusion. (And by that, I mean lasers.) Directed by Ashim Ahluwalia.
"Anhaga" (2023) - Hexorcismos, a musician & AI researcher, created a "neural audio synthesizer" called SEMILLA AI that transformed personal "small data" from disparate musicians into a compilation album of soundscapes called MUTUALISMX. Then video artists Hypereikon used their own AI toolkit to transform a track by Kloxii Li into a gorgeous and alien abstract music video exploring "imaginary materials and mythopoetic minerals." I'm sure a lot more artistry and general whizbangery was involved to get to the finished product, but I bounced off Factmag's densely opaque description of the process with such force that I'm still reeling.
"Your Life In 2014" (2013) - Although the year 2014 has come and gone, the themes in this video are as timeless as they are inscrutable. This is the final video from TV Sehr Witz', a YouTube channel that posted 44 videos from 2007 to 2013, with this collage video as its swan song - a pseudo-inspirational vaporwave dreamcore PowerPoint concoction created by the mysterious Hüllen-Knüller, who purported to be from the year 2037 but look, the channel only has a thousand subs, so you can't really trust these people.
"Sharks Stuck in a House for 90 Seconds" (2023) - Self-explanatory.
Exit Music
By tradition, I close each issue with a song recommendation from the vast canon of "music I've heard of."
One of my favorite music videos in 2022 was "Baby, We're Ascending" by electronic artists HAAi and Jon Hopkins. A few weeks ago, !K7 Records released a new DJ-Kicks mix curated by HAAi, featuring a rework of that track called "Always Ascending" that adds spirited spoken word from hip-hop artist Kam-BU to make explicit the anthemic theme of the original. HAAi noted that the album's "exclusive tracks were produced using the brief 'always ascending' and interpreted uniquely by each artist. I wanted this mix to feel like a continual ascension to collective euphoria." Snag the album over on Bandcamp.
A YouTube playlist with this issue’s recs can be found here.
Until next time, I remain your friendly correspondent, thinking of you,
Scotto
Scotto Moore is the author of WILD MASSIVE, BATTLE OF THE LINGUIST MAGES, and YOUR FAVORITE BAND CANNOT SAVE YOU.
