Corporate Pollution: Take Back the Streets!

Pasi Kolhonen - City Wipeout (2006)

Our public spaces have been sold to the highest bidder and no one seems to care. Our own streets and buildings (not to mention our media) are degraded by the meaningless peddling of products and moreso by the idea that our very neighborhood environments belong to someone else. And everyone has just retreated into the cocoons of their individualized homes where they decorate with the comfort of the exact same, familiar products. Pasi Kolhonen removes our blinders and smacks us upside the head to help us visualize this pervasively personal travesty in an installation called "City Wipeout" that identifies the overwhelming amount of our environment that is bought for the purpose of selling us something. Do you really want 90% of your visual field polluted by thoughtless corporate marketing, your culture defined by the new Neutrogena body wash, and the application of your neighbor's thoughtful art to land them in prison. Seriously though, why have we let our visual culture become DISGUSTINGLY UGLY... it's like pissing in our own cage. Take a minute to look at your immediate surroundings with a critical eye and do something to take back your neighborhood. It should belong to us... why have we let them convince us it's not?

Page France would compose the beautifully euphemistic theme song to the television sitcom version of my life. It would be breezy and pleasant, lighten the real danger of my chronic pratfalls, and constantly play with the subdued chemistry of my tragic love interests. Bouncing xylophone would accentuate the carefree pace of my gait as I walk down the street in a nicely groomed neighborhood. The tense moments where my overt mistakes segue nicely into life lessons would be backed by the middle stanza's solemn guitar and self-reflection. Then, my character would glance into the camera and utter an over-simplistic, but coyly loveable phrase that immediately launches into the redeeming chorus... always serving as the perfect punctuation for the idealized life fractal.

When I finally acquire the rights and convert the show into its appropriate indie film format (directed by Matthew Barney, Michael Gondry, and Wes Anderson), the soundtrack would blossom with the freedom to feature a Radiohead cover of Page France's "Jesus"... accompanied by two hours full of favourites from PJ Harvey, The Frames, Joanna Newsom, Fischerspooner, and the Dresden Dolls. And you know the streets would be graffitied.

Page France - Talking Out Louds (mp3)
[Espisode 2: "Kyle and Friends' Backyard Summer"]

Page France - Chariot (mp3)
[Espisode 6: "Vengeful God Teaches Kyle an Electric Lesson"]

(Aberdeen, Scotland)