Xmas 20

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20 minutes, HD, 2020

Naval was on Facebook Live for twenty minutes Christmas Day, 2020. It’s an excursion to the abyss. This Xmas seemed wonderful, threatening, and unreal.

 

Stackable Thumb’s “Five Stoics”

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five minutes, stereo/color, 1997
Stackable Thumb were:
Valued Cu$tomer
and
Naval Cassidy

“This work studies the inner souls of five inanimate Proxies of Man. Nobody knows the trouble they’ve seen.”

Starting in the mid 1990s, instant cinema duo Stackable Thumb were active for about ten years during the burgeoning live video performance scene of New York City. They were known for their over-the-top shows featuring a dizzying assortment of trash as the subject for their miniature cameras. They preferred cheap electronics and spy cameras over expensive mixing consoles and other broadcast apparatus, 8 bits over 16+ sound, and vaudeville over serious “art work.” Anything could be a subject in front of Stackable Thumb’s camera. To them, absurdity was everywhere they looked. They gleefully displayed it for all to see.

 

Stackable Thumb’s “Grant Me The Krammer Chuck”

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nine minutes, stereo/color, 1998
Stackable Thumb were:
Valued Cu$tomer
and
Naval Cassidy

“A double exposure of two simultaneous revolutionary improvs. Naval tests the impact of centrifugal forces on various objects on his vari-speed motor while Valued rolls his own hand cranked Kitchen Magician to impel other things in circles. These actions take on different import as the video progresses: hypnotism, spin-art, basement voodoo rituals. As the experiment closes, the results are conclusive: meaning can be uncoupled from form with sufficient spin.”

Starting in the mid 1990s, instant cinema duo Stackable Thumb were active for about ten years during the burgeoning live video performance scene of New York City. They were known for their over-the-top shows featuring a dizzying assortment of trash as the subject for their miniature cameras. They preferred cheap electronics and spy cameras over expensive mixing consoles and other broadcast apparatus, 8 bits over 16+ sound, and vaudeville over serious “art work.” Anything could be a subject in front of Stackable Thumb’s camera. To them, absurdity was everywhere they looked. They gleefully displayed it for all to see.

 

Stackable Thumb’s “Foulmouth Rotorvations”

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eight and a half minutes, stereo/color, 1998
Stackable Thumb were:
Valued Cu$tomer
and
Naval Cassidy

“Still emotionally troubled over the Space Shuttle disaster years ago, Naval Cassidy attempts to settle the matter with this video concerning the very crux of the trouble; the o-ring. Using a jelly ring in place of the precious part, and Valued as the Vessel, they reach a conflicted catharsis as everything gets washed down the drain.”

Starting in the mid 1990s, instant cinema duo Stackable Thumb were active for about ten years during the burgeoning live video performance scene of New York City. They were known for their over-the-top shows featuring a dizzying assortment of trash as the subject for their miniature cameras. They preferred cheap electronics and spy cameras over expensive mixing consoles and other broadcast apparatus, 8 bits over 16+ sound, and vaudeville over serious “art work.” Anything could be a subject in front of Stackable Thumb’s camera. To them, absurdity was everywhere they looked. They gleefully displayed it for all to see.

 

Stackable Thumb’s “White Bait Run On”

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I will be posting the work of Stackable Thumb, the dangerous instant cinema duo of Valued Cu$tomer and Naval Cassidy, in the coming days. I’ll start with the soul-wrenching “White Bait Run On”; soul-wrenching as in personality-splitting, as in double-vision meets double-trouble, as in a long-running on and on of the mouth that never stops even when it stops, and it doesn’t stop. ST will obliterate your ego for nothing!