Artist Tauba Auerbach, “Auerglass Organ” (2022)

In the 2012 time travel movie "Looper," the main character Joe (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt in a convincing facial prosthetic) sacrifices himself to change the future. He aims to prevent his older self (Bruce Willis) from killing a child named Cid who is destined to become future villain with unique telekinetic powers— known as The Rainmaker. In the final scene, Cid is grazed by a bullet, but younger Joe’s shoots himself to make older Joe disappear from the timeline— offering the possibility of a different timeline and future outcome for the boy. 🎥 In 1893, Ingersoll Lockwood wrote “Baron Trump's Marvellous Underground Journey”, a tale about young Baron Trump's quest to find a "world within a world." Lockwood’s second book, published in 1896, was titled “1900, Or The Last President.” 🎥 Also in “Looper”, Young Joe/JGL carves a message into his own arm, which appears as a scar on the arm of his future self, Old Joe/Bruce. To communicate a meeting location across time, he carves the name "Beatrix," who was the waitress at a roadside café he often frequented. This choice of name is likely a reference to a line from Thomas Pynchon's book “V.”, which mentions "barmaids named Beatrix" as being the "fairest and saddest." 🎥

In Thomas Pynchon’s novel “Inherent Vice” (and Paul Thomas Anderson’s film adaptation), there’s a subplot involving the improbable collaboration between the Aryan Brotherhood (a white nationalist group) and the Black Guerrilla Family (BGF, a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary black power organization). These prison gangs, typically on polarized opposite sides of racial/ideological lines, find common ground within the labyrinthine and absurd conspiracy driving the novel’s plot, reflecting the surreal nature of 1960s counterculture where biker movies were an important trope about individual freedom. 🎥 Fast forward to 2024, TikTok is lit up with videos of Hells Angels and Outlaws riding to Aurora, Colorado, to confront Venezuelan prison gangs that have taken over neighborhoods (stay tuned). Similar videos are surfacing of Chicago street gangs warning these same Venezuelans about moving into CHI under the same sanctuary city laws as Colorado. 🎥 One iconic 1960s biker movie about rival gangs forming an unholy alliance against a common threat is “The Glory Stompers” (1967). In this film, two rival biker gangs—the Glory Stompers, led by Chino, and the Black Souls, led by Darryl—start off at odds. But when law enforcement becomes the shared enemy (plot-twist, 2024 is the lawless opposite), the gangs grudgingly unite to face the larger threat. 🎥

For those of you into "distant" history (2007 🤣), Van Neistat has been a long-time collaborator with artist Tom Sachs, often documenting Sachs' projects with a low-tech aesthetic and a meticulous approach to storytelling. Together, they've created numerous video pieces (filled with references to Stanley Kubrick). I actually worked on the 2007 Tom Sachs Space Program exhibition with Van and Tom’s then studio manager artist Jeremy Shockley (now a well-known artist himself), where we built a full-scale replica of the Lunar Lander in the main gallery of Gagosian Gallery LA in the heart of Beverly Hills. It was a total cowboy operation with extremely long hours. I was even one of the actors in the film, so I can say I "helped fake a moon landing." 🤣 Buzz Aldrin attended the opening night dinner and was extremely surly and argumentative with Tom (which makes more sense years after). I also once gave Tom Hanks and his son a tour of the sculpture during the exhibition (Hanks having starred in Apollo 13). View quoted note →