Akimbo Hit List, Chuck Samuels
This “Hit List” features my friend and collaborator Chuck Samuels. He most recent work Before Photography is featured this month at Dazibao in Montreal.
Akimbo
Chuck Samuels is a Montréal visual artist who has been exhibiting since 1980. His current exhibition, Before Photography, is on exhibition at Dazibao, centre de photographies actuelles, until February 13. He frequently photographs and/or films himself, and his work tends to address memory, photography, and cinema as subject matter. His photographs have been exhibited extensively in Québec, Canada, and internationally and have been widely published. Samuels’ photographs are part of the collections of la Maison européene de la photographie in Paris, La Musée de la photographie in Charleroi, the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography in Ottawa, and Le Musée secret in Montréal, as well as many private collections in Amsterdam, Atlanta, Berkeley, Chicago, Houston, Montréal, and San Francisco. His installation and video works have been shown in various venues, including several film/video festivals across Canada. Samuels is also the Director General of Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal.
1. Cafe Espresso Lino
I became hopelessly addicted to espresso during a trip to Venezuela in the nineties after which I renounced all other forms of coffee. The Venezuelans would serve a thimble-sized cup so smooth and strong it would wake you up the night before you drank it. I rarely drink more than one espresso a day but it has to be sublime. Dark, rich, robust, and covered by a crema so thick you can walk on it. When I’m running low on coffee beans or in need of technical, philosophical, and even spiritual espresso guidance, I plan a pilgrimage across the city to Little Italy and the nirvana that is Café Espresso Lino to commune with Lino himself. Lino is a kind of gruff guru of coffee, an Italian perfect master. He is the Gamera of espresso.
2. Throne of Blood
Throne of Blood is the Café Espresso Lino of Samurai films in which Shakespeare meets German expressionism meets Noh theatre. Akira Kurosawa has probably cornered this niche market with this fearsome and magnificent film. It features a near-maniacal performance by Toshiro Mifune played against a stylized and restrained rendering by Isuzu Yamada. The combination of elements has no business working but, astonishingly, its grotesque exaggerations ring true.
3. Supercar
When I was about six or seven years old I watched a number of supermarionation science fiction TV shows and my favorite was the runt of the litter, Supercar. Along with his entourage, including Mitch the monkey, Mike Mercury would race around in a futuristic vehicle that could hover, fly, and travel underwater. As a child, this show made assurances to me about the future and technology. I longed for the day when I too would have my own Supercar and travel to distant and exotic lands like Niagara Falls and have my own exciting adventures with a monkey. Today I am fifty-three years old and I don’t have a Supercar. I have an iPod, a computer, and access to the Internet. Big deal. Promises were made. I want my Supercar. In my mind there is no question that Supercar is the Throne of Blood of marionette science fiction TV shows of the early sixties.
4. Coolest Man, Formerly Alive
For my money, no one even comes close to John Lee Hooker in this category. In particular, I recall a 1990 video of a Van Morrison concert in which an elderly Hooker, wearing a dark suit, shirt, tie and fedora, swaggered imperturbably onto the stage. Watching him perform a brief lascivious dance prior to donning his Ray Bans and guitar and launching into It Serves Me Right to Suffer, I knew I was gazing at unmitigated coolness. I definitely consider John Lee Hooker to be the Supercar of Coolest Men, Formerly Alive.
5. Gamera
I recall sitting through double features of Japanese monster movies in the Saturday afternoon dimness of the Empire theatre in Park Extension where I bore witness to a vast array of strange and colossal creatures emitting destructive rays from their various orifices. As I observed them conducting their absurd and furious battles amidst scaled and crumbling models of Japanese cities, I experienced a vertiginous suspension of my suspension of disbelief. For reasons not entirely clear to me then or now, my preferred monster was Gamera, a tremendous toothy turtle who could retract his hind legs into his shell and, by shooting jets of flame from his leg holes, fly like Superman or, in some films, withdraw all his appendages and fly like a spinning Frisbee. Alternately a weapon of mass destruction and a defender of little children, Gamera was, for me, a riveting character – perhaps the John Lee Hooker of Japanese monster movies.