MONDAY, JULY 5 – 8PM EST only at The City Reliquary backyard
IRL… ONE NIGHT ONLY!
Schedule:
7 pm – Doors open, tunes by DJ Daniel DiMaggio (Home Blitz), refreshments
8 pm – Show begins, opening remarks, Spectacle trailers
8:10 pm – THE ETERNAL FRAME
8:35 pm – MORGAN’S CAKE
On the occasion of the post-Fourth of July comedown, Spectacle is pleased to present two classics of mondo Americana:
MORGAN’S CAKE
dir. Rick Schmidt, 1988
United States. 85 mins.
preceded by
THE ETERNAL FRAME
dirs. Ant Farm & T.R. Uthco, 1975
United States. 23 mins.
Can one have their cake and eat it too? Such is the guiding quandary in Bay Area filmmaker Rick Schmidt’s fourth feature, MORGAN’S CAKE, a largely improvised coming-of-age movie filmed on a shoestring budget of $15,000. Morgan (played by Schmidt’s real-life son, Morgan Schmidt-Feng) is down on his luck and turning 18. His girlfriend is pregnant and his bohemian parents don’t offer much stability. He’s conflicted about registering for the draft and spends his time meandering around the city, chatting with an assortment of local eccentrics. What elevates an otherwise straightforward premise is the realness of the performances, from the substanial—e.g. Morgan’s father, played by wily video artist Willie Boy Walker, regaling his son with his true-life story of loading up on LSD to deliberately tank his army psych exam—to the minor, like street-casted San Franciscan denizens sounding off on their feelings about the draft. A breezy pace and natural warmth make this a “slice” of life that is funny, outlandish, and gently elegiac.
It’ll be preceded by what’s maybe the magnum opus of both Ant Farm and T.R. Uthco, two stalwart art collectives from the heyday of heady West coast performance. Funded in part by National Lampoon and the Dilexi Gallery’s Jim Newman, THE ETERNAL FRAME documents the two groups’ efforts to re-enact the assassination of John F. Kennedy, meticulously costuming and choreographing a shot-for-shot remake of the Zapruder film (then not so easy to track down) in front of spectators in Dealey Plaza. Done not merely out of irreverence or post-Watergate bicentennial fatigue, the performance probes media and simulation’s disquieting roles in producing political mythology. Asked at the end of the video “Who killed Kennedy?” T.R. Uthco’s Doug Hall replies, “Who cares? We all did.”
