Here’s a strange one for you: a sexually-charged, pun-laden montage of a television series that seems to be from the 80s, titled “COOKING WITH BEEFCAKE TOO!” Can’t tell if this is like, vintage softcore porn for women or an attempt to go viral by Everything is Terrible, but the jokes are actually pretty funny. “You’re getting me all wet!”/ [laughs] “I have that tendency.” Classic!

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Thought I’d bring this one back for the occasion of the day after the resurrection of Jesus Christ the Lord Our Savior, which we the Chosen People (Americans) celebrate so aptly and appropriately – just as Christ himself probably would – with the purchase of hollow bunny-shaped chocolates most likely manufactured from South American rainforest-killing cocoa beans imported 5,000+ miles to be packaged and sold in excessive layers of plastic and cardboard at your local Rite Aid or Walgreens. Created by Lernert Engelberts en Sander Plug, this video is three years old, but just as Yahweh rose from the dead three days after his crucifixion at the hands of the Romans and the Jews, the video of the melting of the chocolate bunny has now been resurrected from the depths of viral detritus three years after its birth. It is prophesized to ascend to Heaven, but only after some sort of Pentecost-like occurrence, which is as yet not-foretold or known to this devout follower of the Easter Chocolate Bunny Tradition, but will most likely involve fire and a booming voice from the sky. Praise Jesus.

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Jon Rafman is a lucky man for at least two reasons: (1) his priceless sensibility is a veil through which he sees a more beautiful world, a precious one that reaches such a state through the very aesthetic of non-preciousness; (2) he, through scouring the near infinite territory of Google street views, is statistically even able to consistently find universal moments of “condensed being” which would make the greatest haiku poet weep.

Under the auspices of conventional photography, these images — a dog struggling to transgress a gate whose holes are barely larger than its own skeleton; an infant crawling alone in front of a seemingly “fake” Gucci store; a derelict horse gnawing away at urban detritus for food — point to a kind of surreal alienation incurred, unconsciously, by a negligent modern world. These Lynchian moments are informed by their very verity, beyond cinematic or narrative agenda generally imposed by the invoked director, or those like him. The idea of art somewhat cheapens this enterprise.

The lazy and easy answer is that God, his canvas our flesh and the space between us, is a great artist, perhaps a stunning genius so misunderstood that half the world despises him. This is a lesson in entropy, the soft arbitrariness of life, that when finally punctured by a sudden moment, oozes meaning. And yes, our friends at Google may have something to do with this, but their voice is muted, neutral, and merely incidental. Their camera is blind, even glib, in their profit-fueled survey of the known world. And God has yet to sign the gallery consignment, so this leaves us with you, me, and dear Jon, polishing these turds of absurdities into shiny diamonds.

One motif we see over and over again is the prostitute between solicitations, just standing half-naked by a truck, her face blurred out. Such illicitness lends itself to the power of Jon’s either somber or enthralled voyeurism. It is difficult to read Jon, his sense of humor, sadness, cynicism, or irony; perhaps he is merely presenting us a version of a world as a journalist might. The unmarked story, if we are to engage ourselves with these prostitutes, is the explicit trade of sex. The invisible money shot only visible between the two participants. Our role, here, is to not see. But it is not just these whores whose faces are obscured, but everybody’s, as if simply being human is a derogatory act.

These photographs, or I should say curation, are less about seeing than imagination, fueled, ironically, by the boring empiricism of life. We understand perfectly the preceding and subsequent moments of each image. A man crashes his car and lol calls his cell phone. A dog pisses legs raised on a wall, cognizant of and shamed by its non-humanness. A man vomits next to a pay phone, barely missing his shoes. The formal compositions of the photographs barely matter, and after a while, the subjects — the unwitting representatives of our race — seem to blur into one. All the drama — the car crashes, the indignant moonings and middle fingers, the near or imminent deaths, the police arrests, the mysterious fires — are slowly taken for granted, soon to reside in a shallow past, a pool in which we put our own shady memories.

But I never want to forget that butterfly, the orange winged floating period that could end this sentence, if only this sentence marked my end. But I’m still looking, grateful for everything and everyone who might be responsible for this: Jon, God, Google, the butterfly, and maybe even me. People are ugly to one another, yet life, in its ultimate punkdom, is quietly beautiful. It’s ridiculous if you think about it. An OJ-esque white unmarked van with a 360º aggregated view drives around the world to visually dictate the flayed mark of road, passing whores, car crashes, kids on bikes, misguided animals, punks with guns, dying great wide landscapes — passing it all with a billon dollar budget right under our noses, in order to make a timeless appointment with a butterfly, who as a pair of floating lips, was able to muster a silent smile for me.

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Once I Put Some Big Meathooks Through My Flesh and Then Used Them To Haul Myself Into The Air

I’m kind of a geek when it comes to that crazy-physical-endurance stuff, whether it’s performance artists who self-harm or circus sideshow performers. Also, do you remember watching The Cell with Jennifer Lopez and seeing the bad guy hanging in the air from stretched piercings in his back? That blew my mind when I was 13.

I had attended a few days of suspensions, just to see what it was like; I had made some friends, held some hands, stuff like that. I had already been introduced to body piercing and stretching on a small scale, so I had a general idea of what kind of pain was involved. So I tried it.

My suspension was done with four hooks through my upper back, which was good because I just lay flat on a table and let the piercer have his way with me. I don’t remember much about the hooks being put in, although there are tons of pictures of my face contorted in pain and the table covered in sweat after I got up. I know the whole event took pretty long, because it was my first time and I’m a wimp. The hooks got laced up to the ropes and pulleys, and my friend stood to one side and slowly raised me up. The initial stretching of the skin takes the longest – your skin pulls out a couple inches from your body before the tension is enough to lift your full weight off of the ground. There’s actual science involved, but nobody wants to hear about that.

The first few moments of being airborne is like a cross between an orgasm and an extended sneeze: I think my whole body convulsed for a good minute or so. Apparently I was shouting, “it’s like shivering!”

I was up for about an hour, and would’ve stayed longer, but there were other people who wanted to suspend that day. My roommate and I were planning on setting up some permanent rigging in our backyard so we could suspend whenever we wanted. Shoving a hook through someone’s flesh is pretty easy, it turns out, and it’s not difficult to stay sanitary.

Afterwards I tried to do a volunteer bartending gig, but mostly sat in a daze handing out drink tickets. I went to a friend’s place and he ran me a bath and cooked me dinner and massaged all the air bubbles out of my back. That was gross. When your skin stretches out like that, air gets in through the holes and collects in the gaps created, and if you don’t push them out before the holes heal over, it can be pretty uncomfortable. Not that having someone manhandle your open wounds isn’t uncomfortable, but I think the alternative is worse. Also you can hear the air bubbles as they move around under your skin, and it’s weird.

YouTube user Jay Herrod thinks there are some things you should know about women. For instance, “Start giving a woman flowers too often, and she’ll think a man is up to something.” And, “Women talk just as dirty as men.” And, “Not all blond-haired women are dumb and stupid.” He speaks with conviction (and a bit like he’s reading from some Dating for Dummies manual).

Sometimes I feel really freaking awful for watching YouTube videos like this one. I’m not laughing at Jay Herrod, but the only reason I’m watching is because I’m fascinated by how incredibly bizarre he is. Is that wrong? Does that make me a bad human? The conflict is this: on the one hand, he and others like him upload their videos for all of YouTube to see. But on the other hand, would they post these videos if they knew they wouldn’t be taken seriously?

A handful of people have managed to monetize their YouTube laughingstock-ness. But in the case of Jay Herrod and his odd, delusional obsession with teen Disney sensation Selena Gomez and his 2012 presidential campaign, I really don’t know.

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This is an album of strange pain. The cover artwork says so itself, just gaze into it: a blurry image of a naked woman tied up on a bed.    Are you telling me this is a woman as a lover?  Who is this girl?  Is this punishment?  Some kind of  sadomasochism?  What is happening?

What we (seem) to have here is a collection of love songs gone astray due to unfathomable violence, identity confusion, and self-loathing. They are racy, militant recordings mostly about hellish experiences. The lyrics are dirty and suck like black holes. Often, the titles speak for themselves:

• “In Lust You Can Hear the Axe Fall”
• “Guantanamo Canto”
• “You’re Pregnant, You’re Dead”

Even when names appear harmless they merely disguise the perverting and machinating minds behind them; take for example, track #7 “Black Keyboard”:

A child is nothing without hate.
Be certain he feels his love is trash.

All of this is sonically complemented by energetic, manic contrasts. These sounds are appropriately beautiful, as well as disturbing; the range is alarming, the blending fantastical ––

Like in the last song, “Gayle Lynn”, that operatically belches. Only to churn, then to talk; only to squall: lulling and laving thousands of emotions into one master, all-encompassing expression. Remorse, ebullience, curvaceously vexing ––

This is Xiu Xiu, this is Women as Lovers.  This is a fly recording, something worth purchasing and loving for years and years.