Dead Zone
American classics: Weekend at Bernie's and Adrian Piper. Plus Japanese luau music and a Polish energy drink
It’s a bit of a dead zone in the art world at the moment, and a bit of a dead zone in New York, with everyone either out of town or huddled indoors to cope with the steamy first week of real summer heat. Spigot has entered a bit of a dead zone as well; apologies for the slower pace during these months. With luck some terrible exhibition will anoint itself the show of the summer soon.
Things are a bit corpsy in larger ways, of course, which are too obvious to mention. I’ll leave the political-historical analysis to everyone else. The grim American scenario did, however, make for a wooly and alcohol-sodden July 4.
Hung over the following evening, I decided to watch the film that had been on my mind for week—Weekend at Bernie’s. During the revelry in “celebration” of our “independence,” I discovered that a large number of the youth had never heard of it. Open the schools! It’s astonishing that such a brilliant metaphor is at risk of being lost—or was at risk, anyway. I suspect its fame will be (ahem) resuscitated by this year’s presidential campaign.
For those unfamiliar with the indelible 1989 comedy, the plot involves two flunkies at a New York City insurance company, one nebbish and one cretin, who one sweltering August try to impress their boss by pointing out to him several million dollars in fake life-insurance policies that someone has cashed in. As an expression of his gratitude, he invites them to his house on “Hampton Island” for Labor Day weekend. In true horny ’80s-comedy style, the duo are more excited about the babes they expect to be on hand than whatever rise up the corporate ladder their success might portend.
Of course it turns out that the person cashing in the millions of dollars in fake death and dismemberment is their boss, the titular Bernie. His mobster associates, in cahoots on the scheme, dispatch an assassin to whack not the peons but Bernie himself, whose greed is clearly making him a little sloppy. The kids arrive at his palatial beach house at cocktail hour to find their host’s corpse—and from there, hilarity ensues.
Summarily a mob of Hampton lushes and scoundrels descends on Bernie’s place, which turns out to be a social hub—he turns out to have been a real party animal. To solve their one-body problem, the two schnooks prop the dead man on the coach and throw a pair of shades over his half-open eyes. But no need to worry—whether trying to seduce him or haggle with him over a used car, everyone at the soiree is too self-involved to notice that he’s dead.
Weekend at Bernie’s is a satire of ’80s avarice American style, yes, but it plays as a slapstick romp. Every moment in the film underscores something terrible about the characters who populate the Bernie-verse and their motivations, but the film stays remarkably light-hearted. Its strange power is to suppress cognitive dissonance as the party pals drag Bernie out onto the veranda the next day, dump him on the beach, and—spoiler alert—allow some necrophilia involving one of Bernie’s gal pals. Any qualms about the grim propping up of an authority figure are dispelled by Hollywood magic and willful blindness. All you can do is laugh.
Art
Special thanks to the eminent art historian who recently sent me Adrian Piper’s amazing Vanilla Nightmares #20. As evinced here, the stone-cold brilliant Piper can not only sublimate herself into Immanuel Kant, she can also draw, and she balances her philosophical bent atop a precipice of scathing humor, even vulgarity. Like Weekend at Bernie’s, Vanilla Nightmares #20 is from 1989, the year the clock started breaking. Coincidence? Even stranger, the work features in a most indelicate configuration a certain then-middle-aged senator from Delaware—happily on the right side of history on that occasion.
Radio
If you loved the dissection of trend-baiting in my recent normcore essay, listen to the latest edition of the Spigot Radio Hour, now available at Montez Press Radio! It’s a tight 55-minute “oral history” of the espresso martini, featuring artist/beverage influencer Whitney Claflin and New York Times culture reporter Becky Hughes.
Beverages
Speaking of stimulants: a curious tale lies behind my current favorite fix, Tiger Mojito Energy Drink. Scouring the fine print for taurine and vitamin B levels, I spied the name Darius Michalczewski appearing in tiny print just above the product’s bold logo. Michalczewski turns out to have been a Polish boxer, retired in 2005 and nicknamed “Tiger.” Capitalizing on his fame at the time, he licensed his identity to the beverage company FoodCare to great success. The drink quickly grew more popular than Red Bull (in Poland, but hey).
After several years of collaboration, FoodCare double-crossed him, registering new trademarks for a slightly altered logo as well as the name Tiger, arguing Michalczewski had no claim to such a common word. It took a full decade for the case to work its way through the legal system, eventually reaching the Polish supreme court. My parsing of intellectual property law indicates that the 2021 outcome was a split decision: the boxer could not in fact trademark Tiger, but his licensee had in fact ripped him off. Somehow that means Michalczewski’s name ends up on the can I buy at my local grocery.
If you can’t figure it out from the fact that I spent hours of my life researching this story: Tiger Mojito Energy Drink is strong. It has only 80 mg of caffeine but because of its berserker wintergreen flavor it goes down like a liquid menthol cigarette and generates a disproportionate brain-sizzling jolt. The flavor is bad/good in a way that even I struggle to describe, explicitly unhealthy in a manner unlike all those fruit-punch Marvel-comic USA energy drinks made for 14-year-olds whose skin is liquiescing into their gaming chairs. Tiger really does seem closer to something you would sip at an Eastern European MMA gym. It even features a tiny fist as part of its branding—fortunately sideways so as not to convey anything more ominous than a run-of-the-mill inclination to kick some ass.
Music
This week was the 77th birthday of the eminent Haruomi Hosono, for whom membership in Yellow Magic Orchestra is only a secondary accomplishment. He happens to have been born at just the right time of year to fully enjoy Pacific, a delightful album from 1978 by Hosono, Shigeru Suzuki, and Tatsuro Yamashita. I dedicate its limpid tones to PKB, who turned me on to its synth-steelpan charms. If you need help catching the vibe, go straight to “Nostalgia of Island,” which sounds like a 1970s cruise-ship Yo La Tengo.
Don’t forget the original Polish energy drink - an ice cold beer and a shot of pickle juice.