Omphalos/Vance Mellen

     Some night, I was trying out the search results of various alchemical and gnostic keywords on YouTube, scrying for some dark wizard lore, an ancient aliens manifesto, or maybe a renegade guru of consciousness. I happ'd to try the word “omphalos”, a cool-sounding Greek term meaning “navel”, often abused by brain-melted pseudo-philosophers like myself. This was the name given to symbolic stone sculptures used long ago in Greece as a representations of a hub of physical and celestial space. The most famous of these sculptures was that of the mystical oracle at Delphi. The omphalos has come to mean the Axis Mundi, a center and a passageway of dimensions, a world tree or celestial gate, connecting and grounding different worlds. It can can used to mean sacred stones or other powerful objects of various churches, communication with the gods, the center of the Earth or the universe, arguments about creationism, and the stone Zeus' father swallowed in place of his infant son in ancient Greek mythology. It can also be combined with other Greek words to make mystical sounding constructions like “omphaloskepsis”, “omphaloscopy” and “omphalopsychic.” We both just got smarter. People interested in omphaluses on YouTube will write things like:

OMPHALOS is an anagram cipher for OLYMPUS (OLYMPHALOS). This is another allegory of the phallus, which is the Hindu Lingam, that is the pillar, that is the spire, that is the obelisk, which is the premiere symbol, eluding [sic?] to the worship of the deepest control structure.

Those on the lower rungs of the hierarchy of control worship "the most high"
"light, more light!", they cry
as the children around them lay slain and die,
ever profane they shall remain
as SLAVES in LIES

     My “omphalos” search led me through a tribe of women in a spooky sword dance, a religion based on writings occultist Aleister Crowley transcribed from an encounter with the astral being Aiwass, videos tracing Queen Elizabeth's line back to the biblical Abraham (who was really the first Egyptian pharaoh), and lots of dark, ambient music. Eventually I came upon a video of a hairy square of disembodied paunch with a roving eye for a belly button and a big rough lump to the side (a mole, it turned out). It was accompanied by creaking, watery sounds, like a working stomach magnified. A lispy whisper took me through some spiritual (Mormon) thoughts around the piece with the exaggerated, infuriating cadence of someone who ignores their listener's cues of disinterest and panic: a boring neighbor, a fossilized teacher, a friend's dad you try not to encourage. The artist's name was Vance Mellen. The belly was his belly and the eye was his eye. This video was years old, with views that were in the low hundreds, and something told me that the Mellenhead Productions it came from was probably not owned by a different Mellen. I had to know more.

     On Mellen's page I saw how vast and varied his work is: there are videos of his stories at youth conferences, competitions and opening for his exhibits, a home-made version of Shakespeare's “As You Like It”, cataloged acting reels of his wife, animations of moving machinery, fake Santa sightings, a skateboarding film made with boy scouts, multi-tracked acapella songwriting, and experimental horror movies of the short and loud variety. There are also videos explaining his paintings and sculptures, such as a fertility fetish for increasing reproduction, a suit for God inspired by Elvis and William Blake, and a tinfoil roll of toilet paper with scriptures for a church he would like to build a thousand years from now.

     Despite the cosmic concerns of much of his art, Mellen is primarily focused on scaring children. Most of his storytelling footage involves him trying to spook groups of young people in the dark, and he has painted intricate portraits of each of his own children in harm's way: breaking free of parental guidance and wandering near a mountaintop ledge , playing with scorpions, losing circulation from being twisted in string, trapped underwater by an inflatable. Mellen has produced an alien movie where his kids kill each other and made a movie (for kids) where he plays a creepy Southerner and locks kids in a barn to be eaten by dinosaurs.

     Maybe he's such an aggressive spooker because he got scared so bad in his own childhood: He claims to have accidentally fried his brother by putting an electric cord into the boy's mouth, which stopped his heart for a half hour until their father and a Mormon bishop resurrected him In his youth. Vance Mellen also used to watch escaped mental patients try and kill themselves by jumping off the bridge in front of his house near the Kansas State Mental Institution, where his mom would later send him to the be locked in a dark room to face his fears and ease his trauma. Despite all of this, I think his art bores most people, and his YouTube account gives off the impression his life is pleasant and prosaic, Midwestern and Mormon. Mellen's actors and audiences always seem to be slightly embarrassed but tolerant community and family members. Mellen's work is perplexing and ambitious, in a way that I suspect will make his kids want to die from shame when they're older, but for now it seems like they love their untethered father, who is raising a family and pursuing an artistic life with passion and humor.

Snorkie the Mouse

Dan Bailey

     It's not Dan Bailey's birthday, but it's time for a birthday pizza with candles while he drinks and watches wrestling. His limbs are tired and angular, and his face is the wilted “W” of someone slowly digesting a dark truth. He's burning pieces of paper on the coiled burners of his electric stove, silent smoke alarms hovering above forlornly like angels who've given up. “Have you tried the burning soap? Don't use it; it burns. I thought about it, and I think maybe it's like this... Because I made it like this.” Behind a rainy windshield, wandering through an electronics warehouse, sitting in bleak, dorm-like Midwestern housing, filming a dog having a nightmare, the poet is working. Scrabbling with his long descriptive hands, he is grasping at dead space, gripping ghost tits while his harsh, surreal mutterings present the wounded musings of an artist living and hurting and growing for a few years. Like an old letter from a friend, he projects a deep, quiet nostalgia; a dark cousin updating us on the state of existence from his empty Midwestern plain. College friends, cheap beer, the glow of screens, living rooms, old dogs, used books, bad lights, bored hands, humming fridges, paper on marbled linoleum, unused candles, cheap bathrooms.
     Did you know people still play? Connection is still available to us all, in some strange, unknowable place that hovers. You can be a magician even if you don't have a plan. You can create something just for delight. You can be a performer for an audience of the future. You can leave behind a world of wonder in one lonely night. The internet has room for all of us.
     Keep drinking, keep writing. Dan floats in a clanky tub, intoning dull and nasal, reaching for some aloof vapor of alms. The hollow grinding of floating cans slapping white vinyl, the spray of confusing lights and the pale, drawn face of our fearless narrator, who unreliably brings us by the wet hand into a sad, quiet place of beauty. Bailey's work is earnest and surreal, humor disarmingly surrounding a dark vortex of sleepy augorism. Pursuing his unknowable missions with a smooth sureness, blurry ideas are brought to their cheeky end, and a badly-lit evening a few years back lays partially exhumed from its refuge beneath the babbling tides of the internet.

walking through the artificial light

Crystal Stix

      This week's video details the use of some forgotten spiritual implements of the 1990's: Crystal sticks. Crystal sticks are the tools of a symbolic practice that provides spiritual and aesthetic relief to an arid, olden-times prison made of hot dirt and hexagonal space structures. This complex, packed up to the highest topknot with colorful barbarian rabble and unattended children, is under the control of sensei and tassle-festtooned man Bob Vestal, our guide and narrator, and devoted entirely to the study of Bob's hand-held metaphysical quest game that he stole from indigenous people, similar to a hackey-sacks or diabolos.

      As our illuminated vision (or “video-magazine”) progresses, it becomes clear that through Crystal Stix one can master all aspects of life, from improving one's “drawing skills” and releasing “different areas” of one's “wisdom”, to healing physical pain and helping one “connect” to “the rhythm they feel in the air”. As Bob says in the midst one of the video-magazine's many anti-climaxes: “I'm better than ever!” From atop the sacred mountain Bob draws us with friendly confidence through the ascending moves of the wobbling stick trio, and the warped body flexings he employs to enhance the magic of the workout and overall visual impressiveness. We flash across different planes of existence, from the dirty camp palisade in the brooding sun, to a healing dungeon's austere (but hip) mistress, to some kind of Lynchian blue lodge where a beautiful woman mummified in white, diaper-like nylon gyrates to unheard music.

      Bob's message (and that of his eerie Renaissance tribe of visionaries) is that through the spiritual practice of the Crystal Stix, young stixmen can become masters of concentration, control, confidence, bravado and finally, pussy. From the writhing skirt-twirlers of the opening Gypsy Magic procession, to Bob's open parading of his beautiful wife and daughter's fecundity and poise, to the unaccountably attractive women involved in this stick-camp incarceration, it is clear that with the mastery of these three candy cane spell-staffs, winning the heart of a fair young maiden interested in self-improvement is a trifle.

     The viewer's building sexual hunger is at last released in one feverish jam in the final inner sanctum of a geodesic tent-structure, where the drone of hand-drum and didgeridoo beckon us across the last groovy threshold. As the drums go louder and the acrobatics of the stixsters more snake-like and complex, we depart in a shuddering spiritual climax and then are sold a miracle garment also shaped like a hexagon (pay attention!), that makes up Bob's tasseled pants and (surprise!) many other garments from the anachronistic dreamworld where these Northern California dervishes spin their rods. The video is finally solidly backed up by some rock-hard science commentary, in case there were any lingering doubts viewers still had about the new spiritual precipice on which stands our funky world.

crystal stix

Happeh Theory

      Nine years ago a man named Jalon joined Youtube.com and began a mission to construct a new spiritual, scientific, and sexual understanding of the world. His first video was titled “Why Gay is associated with Lopsided Body” and used a very understandable graphic of a human skeleton held up by a giant pair of lopsided organs. The presentation concisely demonstrated that each person's kidneys can become unbalanced in a kind of inner sexual dimorphism that leads to uneven body posture. This was the beginning of an enormous body of work realizing a new world view called Happeh Theory. 

      Heavily informed by the schools of misunderstood Asian philosophy and the Youtube anti-masturbation community, Happeh Theory uses ruthless slide show technology and futuristic graphic models to topple pillars of science and philosophy and help us understand that masturbation will make us blind, crippled homosexuals shaped like uneven trapezoids. In his impressively vast and entirely un-linear offerings of Happeh Theory, Jalon also takes us deeper and deeper into an understanding of his mind, I mean your body. We learn that holes in the human body are created in essentially the same way as a hurricane: both are like the Yin Yang sign. The human body itself can be treated as a yin yang sign, or for that matter a pyramid, jellyfish, foot, or blob.

      Happeh Theory's points are also made abundantly clear through Jalon's diagramming of the human body. Pulling an innumerable amount of studly beefcake photos from the net and then drawing shapes over their faces and bodies, Jalon quickly and indisputably reveals the warping and uneven tightening they've inflicted on themselves: the “cigar mouth” lips, rising asymmetrical shoulders and endlessly gripping hands. It's clear we must never masturbate or be gay.

      A relentless advocate for his school of understanding, this home guru robotically draws us slowly along, his logic rock solid and consistent. Both anuses and funnels do have a hole, and it makes sense pirates have hooked hands, because they're at sea for so long without sex. The cyclops creature of legend is based on real life people who act and look like they only have one eye. A penis can be viewed as a taurus, or as two revolving pillars. Masturbation leads to homosexuality because it tightens your anus up to the point where it needs a penis massage to get loose again.

     Jalon is like a conspiracy investigator uncovering the secret gayness running the world. As he builds his base of knowledge, the true yearnings of his heart leak out into the videos, like a man expressing a dark secret against his will. Will he one day understand that he has been sleeper agent for the enemy all along?  

cigar mouth

Arizona Gene

      The autobiographical videos of Jokerlately's 2009-2011 based Youtube account mark a turbulent time in American politics, when Barack Obama, the long-legged mac daddy emperor-in-chief, was rolling out the threat of a three state boycott of Arizona to let racist, drug-related Mexicans get over the border tax-free in order to rob and rape us. This was before the discovery that Obama was a socialist dictator funded by terrorists and actually the same person as Osama Bin Laden, all of which Jokerlately (A.K.A. Arizona Gene) correctly foretold back in 2008, along with the clairvoyant prediction that America's rich would flee to Belize in tax panic. A sharp-tongued satirist and partisan, Gene uses his videos to contrast his life's simple homespun joys with the constant, lurking fear that informs his devastating political paranoia.

      We are given a lucid experience of Gene's cartoon and cowboy hobby art with sets of semi-linear explorations where computer screensaver technology blends with physically drawn paintings and cartoons, propped in a corner of a dull room, or perhaps held in the shaky hand of the artist, who narrates, often passing over written dialogue and a partially visible script he does not follow. Further perspective dissonance is added by the facts that most of these videos are verbally addressed to President Obama, who Arizona Gene angrily reprimands in defense of Arizona and her gentle people. Gene is comfortable in the role of accuser, confronting many objects as as his enemies, from jibing a pair of Egyptian mummies he believes are the Obamas to insisting the mountain he paints every day is hiding terrorists.

      This clash of natural wild country with the conquering hegemony of modernity is a constant theme in Gene's work revisited repeatedly, from his constant portrayal of the wild west to his painting of Columbus exploring the New World. Gene seems to have some awareness of his idealization of the wild frontier, keeping a pet leopard statue in his back yard, praying to the Great Spirit, and remarking at one point that he disguises himself as a cowboy.

      As you may have guessed by now, Gene is not necessarily a reliable narrator. Playing off his believable and gentle manner, Gene's work actually contains many false clues and messages, such as his claims that a video is short, about to end, that it's going to get more interesting soon, that he has a pet duck, or a wife. Arizona Gene is constantly exploring the role of spectator in his art, introducing his audience to a new, confusing world which binds Gene's life and art together in an indistinct juxtaposition, forcing his audience to consider questions of the truth of identity and reality. We see life through Gene's eyes, but not through his mind, as he publicly confronts strangers, animals and inanimate things with his camera and trembling, grandfatherly voice. The images we see are sunny and peaceful, people smiling back and Arizona looking as beautiful and serene as the folksy hobby art Gene paints with a friendly, conservative hand, but the darkness of the mental landscape is looming and ever-present.

Gene's Star Wars art