I warn you guys. This is a very wierd little movie. It was done in true anarcho-syndicalist fashion by a group of about ten video directors in this massive abandoned steel plant. This place was so toxic that
all the security guards who worked there had sort-of Philip K.Dick-style mutations and skin lesions growing madly. The plant had been built to supply steel to the naval shipbuilders in San Pedro during WWII, and its passing took with it the local economy. See Mike Davis' book "City of Quartz" for the fascinating and tragic history of the Kaiser Steel Mill in Fontana CA. After the plant closed (I think in the 70's) the Army Corps of Engineers used it to test explosives. If anyone's ever wondered what several thousand tons of dynamite can do to a concrete structure (as I have), then mark Fontana on your travel calendar. Massive concrete and steel smokestacks, split in two, with the top half a good fifty yards from the base; aircraft hangar-size buildings cleaved as with some giant axe... A stunning (and sobering) display of almost geologic-size violence and destruction. This is not your tidy little staggered implosion-style building demolition. This is more like what parts of Chechnya must look like now.
The movie was never quite finished. There was meant to be a stock ticker running under the whole thing which we never laid in. The narrator is supposed to be a kind of put-upon bureaucrat detailing the necessity for population control via "ethnically rifled" bio weapons, much like they supposedly used in South Africa. The "Born For Love" sequence is pretty amazing, as well as "the Postman" sequence, in which a sweet-faced elderly Oriental man maintains a tragic serenity under an unending assault of water,
as Jim Jones shrieks bloody murder on the soundtrack.
This is not your father's music promo vid, unless your father is William Burroughs, or, I guess, me.
I'd love to see it if you manage to get ahold of it., and I'd happily pay some money.
Yrs,
David Baerwald
I wondered whatever happened...
B
Baerwald
(view)
I warn you guys. This is a very wierd little movie. It was done in true anarcho-syndicalist fashion by a group of about ten video directors in this massive abandoned steel plant. This place was so toxic that
all the security guards who worked there had sort-of Philip K.Dick-style mutations and skin lesions growing madly. The plant had been built to supply steel to the naval shipbuilders in San Pedro during WWII, and its passing took with it the local economy. See Mike Davis' book "City of Quartz" for the fascinating and tragic history of the Kaiser Steel Mill in Fontana CA. After the plant closed (I think in the 70's) the Army Corps of Engineers used it to test explosives. If anyone's ever wondered what several thousand tons of dynamite can do to a concrete structure (as I have), then mark Fontana on your travel calendar. Massive concrete and steel smokestacks, split in two, with the top half a good fifty yards from the base; aircraft hangar-size buildings cleaved as with some giant axe... A stunning (and sobering) display of almost geologic-size violence and destruction. This is not your tidy little staggered implosion-style building demolition. This is more like what parts of Chechnya must look like now.
The movie was never quite finished. There was meant to be a stock ticker running under the whole thing which we never laid in. The narrator is supposed to be a kind of put-upon bureaucrat detailing the necessity for population control via "ethnically rifled" bio weapons, much like they supposedly used in South Africa. The "Born For Love" sequence is pretty amazing, as well as "the Postman" sequence, in which a sweet-faced elderly Oriental man maintains a tragic serenity under an unending assault of water,
as Jim Jones shrieks bloody murder on the soundtrack.
This is not your father's music promo vid, unless your father is William Burroughs, or, I guess, me.
I'd love to see it if you manage to get ahold of it., and I'd happily pay some money.
Yrs,
David Baerwald
all the security guards who worked there had sort-of Philip K.Dick-style mutations and skin lesions growing madly. The plant had been built to supply steel to the naval shipbuilders in San Pedro during WWII, and its passing took with it the local economy. See Mike Davis' book "City of Quartz" for the fascinating and tragic history of the Kaiser Steel Mill in Fontana CA. After the plant closed (I think in the 70's) the Army Corps of Engineers used it to test explosives. If anyone's ever wondered what several thousand tons of dynamite can do to a concrete structure (as I have), then mark Fontana on your travel calendar. Massive concrete and steel smokestacks, split in two, with the top half a good fifty yards from the base; aircraft hangar-size buildings cleaved as with some giant axe... A stunning (and sobering) display of almost geologic-size violence and destruction. This is not your tidy little staggered implosion-style building demolition. This is more like what parts of Chechnya must look like now.
The movie was never quite finished. There was meant to be a stock ticker running under the whole thing which we never laid in. The narrator is supposed to be a kind of put-upon bureaucrat detailing the necessity for population control via "ethnically rifled" bio weapons, much like they supposedly used in South Africa. The "Born For Love" sequence is pretty amazing, as well as "the Postman" sequence, in which a sweet-faced elderly Oriental man maintains a tragic serenity under an unending assault of water,
as Jim Jones shrieks bloody murder on the soundtrack.
This is not your father's music promo vid, unless your father is William Burroughs, or, I guess, me.
I'd love to see it if you manage to get ahold of it., and I'd happily pay some money.
Yrs,
David Baerwald
