Kranky Klaus

An intensely filmed look at the San Fernando Valley backyard wrestling scene in the late 20th century. Driven by a pumping soundtrack created by the Melvins (Jamie’s band), it is vivid, and visceral, and a little scary. It is part of a trilogy along with the films “Spook House” and “Kranky Klaus”.

This DVD examines the multiple points of cultural contact between the United States and Mexico. From the Santa Barbara Fiestas and South Carolina's kitschy "South of the Border" tourist complex, to a Mexican Beatles cover band and Chicano rap, this film reveals the borderlands as a laboratory of hybridity that continues to ignite the popular imagination of each nation. Working at the boundaries of experimental film and documentary travelogue, this film weaves together found footage, interviews, performance art, and music video, producing a masterful commentary that is at once poetic, disturbing and hilarious. Includes appearances by Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Aztlán Underground, among others.

Massage the History records amateur dancers, whom Jamie found accidentally online, who freely engage the quotidian domestic scene with their own sexually suggestive movements. Unintended for an actual audience, the automatic nature of their body language evolves from an intimate spectacle into a dreamlike scenario of transcendence through onanistic desire.