Sacha Wheeler

Amsterdam, August 2010

Sacha — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 15:30:15 +0000

A lovely long weekend in Amsterdam, ostensibly to escape the Notting Hill Carnival, but really that was just an excuse. Thanks to Chris, Grant, Mercedes and Brigitte (and the dogs).

0 views on flickr.

“Does anyone know Sasha Wheeler?”

Sacha — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 13:19:26 +0000

A funny conversation about a namesake of mine.

Download Festival, Donnington 2010

Sacha — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 17:06:47 +0000

AC/DC and Them Crooked Vultures at Donnington for the Download Festival. I’d never have paired these two in the same event, but they were each unbelievably awesome, and for very different reasons.

Angus Young is better than anyone alive (and most of them dead) at holding 100,000 metalheads in awe than I would have thought possible. AC/DC are so fucking tight, it makes you redefine all one’s scales for measuring commitment and musical skill. And their riffs are up there with Led Zeppelin’s – that’s right, I said it – as the defining moments of the electric guitar.

Dave Grohl, Josh Homme, John Paul Jones & Alain Johannes are simply the coolest men with whom I’ve ever been in an arena. I have man crushes on them all. They love playing, they love playing together, and (it seems) they love playing for me, because every time I see them they break out new stuff better than I’ve ever heard before. They defined the festival, and they are my only trusted template for being male.

AC/DC closing the night with “For Those About To Rock (We Salute You)” was not only inspired timing for the evening, but also (I thought) a generous tribute to the bands which would follow and the rockers who would camp out to hear them for the next 2 days. I got all misty eyed, and cherished the opportunity to see these 2 great bands with Diana, my love.

533 views on flickr.

Korsakoff’s Psychosis by Return to Netley Things Have Changed

Sacha — Sun, 30 May 2010 21:20:49 +0000

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cgc4GQAEyiE

Revisiting some footage of atomic tests. Explosions often feature in my videos. Some of this was used previously in Queens of the Stone Age – In My Head. Read into it what you will, but I find these explosions to be very seductive.

The song is by shardcore with whom I recently saw Philip Glass perform Koyaanisqatsi live. It might have influenced this video a bit.

I’ve been busy recently, with work and my guitar, but it’s nice to have an afternoon to give to FCP.

71 views on youtube.

Awesome birthday card from shardcore

Sacha — Thu, 13 May 2010 09:39:00 +0000

An awesome birthday card from shardcore perhaps influenced by my gift to myself of a Fender Stratocaster and Marshall amp. I’m 41.

I’m becoming obsessed with Apollo 11

Sacha — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 08:08:17 +0000

This is awesome. I’m quite a fan of slow motion footage, but this is even more beautiful than most. Reminds me of the last few minutes of Koyaanisqatsi.

A few months ago I found myself seated next to an ostensibly intelligent man in his 60s who admitted to “doing nothing” for a living and had no scientific experience, and yet was certain that the moon landings were faked. It turned into a bit of a scene.

I was about 6 weeks old when this footage was shot – I’ll never get bored of it. Here’s some weirdly wonderful ambient music to keep your day themed “Apollo” from Soma fm.

The State of Punk

Sacha — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 09:06:08 +0000

I grew up on the King’s Road in the 70s and as such have a fondness for the punk movement, even though I recognise it was always an extremely middle class movement (The King’s Road is in Chelsea, after all). It was always clear that the hairstyles and clothing required to look as if one didn’t care took hours to prepare and maintain. It was for punks, not Farrah Fawcett clones that those half-metre cans of hairspray were made.

But by 1980, to paraphrase Withnail, they were selling Mohawk wigs in Woolworths and now the whole style of the movement has been adopted by hipsters born in the 90s who think they’re terribly clever to have discovered it for themselves. But Hipsters get it wrong. They latch onto the irony of the movement but pull up short of the subversive offensiveness that gave punk it’s teeth.

The question haunts me: To what extent is a punk attitude even possible any more?

I always thought that the last remaining punk statement was, perhaps to buy an old Rolls Royce (1988 ROLLS ROYCE ROLLS ROYCE for $9k, 1978 ROLLS ROYCE BLUE/BLACK for £2k, 1976 ROLLS ROYCE SILVER SHADOW BLUE for £1,850) and slowly drive it into the ground. Paint it unprofessionally, let it rust, don’t avoid or fix dents; let it die, in public, slowly. The last punk act, I thought, echoing the commercialism of the 1980s which (in fact) crushed punk’s amateur sensibilities under the wheels of Thatcherism and shoulder pads. I’m still planning to do this, after all, a Roller is a pretty sweet ride.

I’m encouraged by some of the recent subversive ideas I’ve seen out there.

Shardcore‘s recent distribution of ever-so-slightly subversive bank notes has a subtlety that appeals to me.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJF3R-sGrZg

I’m reminded of John Carpenter’s They Live! where subversive messages were revealed by filtering out certain wavelengths of light, but the real pleasure is simply in knowing that these things are out there, potentially in any pocket, being used for any purpose.
The Costco Prank is a classic.
A lot of effort to subvert someone else’s shopping experience, but when shopping experiences are the only way humans truly interact with the world, what better target for punk. We have become unquestioning shopping apes and I applaud anything which might get one or two of us to question how this terrible state of affairs came about.
Copyright infringement, to me, seems an extension of punk which quickly became a musical statement; specifically, that one didn’t need to know how to write or play music. Take someone else’s song (say, Roadrunner) and allude to it slightly while swaggering drunk on stage, and still expect to get the girls/guys afterwards. Punk spread through the vector of mix-tapes, bootlegs and plagiarised songs, the principle message (consciously ironic, considering its middle class roots) being “All property is theft” (a no-more hyperbolic statement than the often repeated, yet definitively incorrect, equation of copyright infringement and theft).

Punk started in art schools, and quickly seduced an underclass with it’s adolescent subversion.

I’m reminded of this as I hear from my window the sounds of a spray can been shaken; the 30 year old “art student” who just moved into the £1.7 million flat (Notting Hill) beneath us has been spray-painting canvasses in his garden all afternoon. Canvasses! If he had any soul at all, he’d be spraying that on someone else’s wall and allow his “art” to stand for itself. But he’s thinking about his market, and it’s easier to market a canvas than vandalism.

Punk is dead.

Caligulove – Them Crooked Vultures & Betty Boop

Sacha — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 23:42:06 +0000

www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Fy_yRCMxhM

Betty Boop used to party! Here, she is set to Them Crooked Vultures’ song Caligulove. A little lighter than recent videos.

And picked up by MTV_Music‘s twitter stream:

1,244 views on youtube.

Airbourne @ Hammersmith Apollo

Sacha — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 23:24:01 +0000

Only band I’ve seen 3 times. They seemed to be better the other 2 times. Smaller crowds, perhaps. Still much fun.

835 views on flickr.

Manners by Return to Netley Things Have Changed

Sacha — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 17:40:10 +0000

www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0izLsPwyw8

It’s nice to use music to which I have the rights, or at least whose rights belong to a friend (shardcore) who is unlikely to complain.

I’m not sure why I was so fixated on spanking for this video -- it’s not a fetish, but I’ve always associated *manners* with parental punishment and I had Catholic discipline in my mind, for some odd reason, and they love that stuff. Using footage from *Drugs are Like That (1979)*, *The Innocents (1961)*, *The Bad Seed (1956)* & *Albert Fish: In Sin He Found Salvation (2007)*.

164 views on youtube.

Hominid by Return To Netley Things Have Changed

Sacha — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 00:13:22 +0000

www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPuTGXM5HhA

I made a video for the song Hominid by Return To Netley Things Have Changed (onetime project of shardcore), with footage from some odd behavioural experiments with a child and a chimp that I found on archive.org.

It does not come as a surprise to me that while I was using twitter and other *social* networks, my productivity dropped to nothing. Deleting my online accounts suddenly returned the time and focus that had been consumed by irrelevancies. I’m just saying… ymmv.

270 views on youtube.

Sparrow taking a bath

Sacha — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 18:56:37 +0000

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nhl1wQ3LYaM

Set to Nino Rota’s Las Dolce Vita. This sparrow was loving this bath and, perhaps perversely, all I could think of was Gina Lollobrigida, hence Nino Rota.

61 views on youtube.

Seagull in the Round Pond

Sacha — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 20:34:20 +0000

Kinda boring, I know, but I was playing with exposure and focus.

Supercard.com, CTO

Sacha — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 10:55:31 +0000

Supercard.com is a specialist retailer of Supercard DS One and R4 DS products supplying peripherals, memory cards and handheld gaming accessories.

It was built using Magento, the open source e-commerce platform

Them Crooked Vultures @ Hammersmith Apollo

Sacha — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 09:15:42 +0000

Josh Homme, Dave Grohl & John Paul Jones doing what men do.

594 views on flickr.

Free – Brompton Cemetery

Sacha — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 11:25:39 +0000

www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQVHn_MTJTM

Skateboarding in Brompton Cemetery (London) on the last nice day of 2009.

Incidentally, I’ve since come to dislike this song; it’s a bit adolescent, even for me, but a man mustn’t be ashamed of his mistakes.

183 views on youtube.

Wasp on the Windowsill

Sacha — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 16:34:01 +0000

www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKjKrvSLX0A

A huge wasp flew in my window and I had my camera to hand. Set to Einstürzende Neubauten. I really like ants, wasps and bees.

301 views on youtube.

Loving You

Sacha — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 23:35:23 +0000

I was in a peculiar mood, somewhere between nostalgia, sentimentality and furious violence.

views on metacafe.

Medusa in the Water

Sacha — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 20:57:37 +0000

www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNwsQpzx3Bw

A Medusa jellyfish in the water off Camogli, Italy. The music is From Nine Inch Nails, Ghosts. For a few minutes I felt a strong kinship to this poisonous little fellow -- he’s just trying to be left alone.

248 views on youtube.

Reflections in Camogli, Italy

Sacha — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 23:40:05 +0000

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z10RjEyB3s4

Cut to Fantomas’ Investigation Of A Citizen Above Suspicion. I’m starting to get video to look the way I want (this was shot with the Lumix).

103 views on youtube.

Sacha Wheeler

Amsterdam, August 2010

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