Cuckoo clocks in at 102 minutes, but it will take at least that long for even the most forgiving horror movie fan to sort it all out after sitting through it.
Once the strenuous audio-visual effects are taken into consideration and filed neatly away, writer-director Tilman Singer’s latest, a follow-up to his 2018 shockeroo, Luz, boils down to a meticulously bizarre troubled-family exercise centered on a 17-year-old girl named Gretchen (American former fashion model Hunter Schafer) and her family’s awful summer vacation in the German up-country. It’s an ordeal for Gretchen, and us.
As their car pulls up in front of the Alpschatten Resort, it’s clear that Gretchen’s father Luis (Márton Csókás) and her stepmother Beth (Jessica Henwick) practice a method of child-rearing light on warm cuddles and heavy on icy dismissiveness. They have no time for Gretchen’s needy adolescent truculence. But distressingly, Luis and Beth also seem fed up with their own younger child, Alma (Mila Lieu), who suffers from epilepsy and hears disturbing, other-worldly sounds.
As this dismal scenario plays out, Luis, Beth and most of the other characters, including the all-important Gretchen, are in the habit of delivering their dialogue in a tone we might expect to hear from a home appliance technician announcing, “Ma’am, your ice-maker water line is blocked.”
Stir in the resort guests’ competing European languages and the odd noises coming from unexpected corners, and Cuckoo takes shape as not only a portrait of irritating, irritated people but a melodramatic obstacle course, with horror-flick shock cuts and non-sequiturs aplenty. No wonder Gretchen wants to jump on her bicycle and get away.
At the resort, owner Herr König (British TV-and-film vet Dan Stevens) might have stepped out of any number of creepy-landlord stories. His stereotypical Teutonic accent and awkward body language naturally raise warning flags for Gretchen. She’s already bent out of shape by her parents, but König’s mad-scientist theories on such subjects as “brood parasites” and “vanishing twin syndrome” only add to the general distress. More than that, he pronounces her name “GREAT-shun,” a perfectly understandable but spooky mannerism when lumped in with the overall queasy-making atmosphere.
The characters hanging around the Alpschatten—translation: Alpine shadow—bring their own individual nuttiness to an already odd situation. Dr. Bonomo (Proschat Madani) interrogates Gretchen with concentration-camp efficiency. Ed, another lost soul (Astrid Bergès-Frisbey), wanders into a scene, utters something incomprehensible, then wanders away. Gretchen’s front-desk companion, Trixie (Greta Fernández), has a complicated private life—a few of her scenes are looped for maximum confusion. Policeman Henry (Jan Bluthart) is in the middle of an investigation of Herr König. And then there’s the local gremlin, a berserk woman in a raincoat whose hobby is popping up out of nowhere and chasing our poor teenager.
Everyone in the cast seemingly conspires to either scare, reject or harm Gretchen. She accumulates bruises, lacerations and bloody scars as the movie goes on, amid incessant shrieks and squeaks coming from the dark forest surroundings. Cuckoo may set a record for on-camera scenes of vomiting.
Gretchen’s nerve-wracking visit to the Alps eventually takes on overtones of Roman Polanski’s psychological horror pic, Repulsion (1965), with Catherine Deneuve going crazy after being left home alone in a Paris flat. The big difference is that here, high in the mountains, Gretchen’s nemesis is other people. She’s haunted every minute by strangers with menacing intentions. No one ever really stops picking on her.
German filmmaker Singer hurls everything he’s got at Gretchen, an endlessly derivative assault of grotesqueries in the service of what is essentially the tale of a custody battle. The violence, physical as well as emotional, grows wearisome. Conscientious horror-flick fans may begin to wonder if this ill-tempered young woman is worth the trouble.
Is Hunter Schafer the new Mia Goth? Anyone attempting to seriously address that question deserves to be sentenced to a weekend at the Alpschatten. Or an hour and a half watching Cuckoo. What a choice.
Sonoma County ballot measure would ban large livestock farms
This November, voters in Sonoma County will decide on a first-of-its-kind proposal, known as “Measure J,” to ban large, concentrated animal-feeding operations.
The industrial farms primarily raise chickens, ducks and cattle.
Kristina Garfinkel, a Santa Rosa resident and an organizer with the Coalition to End Factory Farming, said the large operations tend to have poor records when it comes to animal welfare, and spark environmental concerns with the odor and runoff from the lagoons of animal waste.
“They pollute water with nitrates, phosphates,” Garfinkel said. “They also pollute the air through greenhouse gas emissions, and they’re also just perfect vectors to spread very contagious diseases, such as avian flu and things like that.”
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the state monitor the water supply near large farms on a regular basis. The operations are also subject to state rules on animal welfare and often participate in voluntary organic certification programs.
The measure would give the large farms three years to either reduce the size of their herds or flocks, or wind down operations, and would require the county to retrain any workers who lose their jobs.
Randi Black, dairy adviser for the University of California Cooperative Extension, said Measure J would cost the county millions.
“There is a pretty large impact on both our local agricultural economy but also on our workforce,” Black noted. “Both being able to be employed but also on our county budget, in order to provide the mandated training.”
A similar proposed ban will be on the ballot in Berkeley this fall, but since the city does not have any such large operations the measure would prevent any future large animal farms from coming in.
“Over the last 30 years we have built a sustainable and organic food system in our community. The generational family farms that exist at the heart of our farming system have always been at the center of this sustainable transformation,” said Albert Straus, of Straus Family Creamery, a local family-owned business likely to be adversely affected by Measure J.
“Today, our regional food community provides high quality food for local residents and organic consumers around the country while also serving as a global example of on-farm environmental stewardship and climate-positive practices,” he added. “Measure J threatens to completely undercut our decades of transformational work.”
Straus is far from alone in his opposition to the measure. An alliance of Sonoma County-based organic and sustainable agricultural and climate-positive practices, businesses, local food systems, and environmental stewardship organizations and businesses announced their opposition to Measure J in a statement released by the California Climate & Agriculture Network.
“Sonoma County is home to some of California’s best agricultural stewards whose farms provide numerous climate and environmental benefits such as storing carbon in soil, limiting energy-intensive urban sprawl, and providing wildlife habitat and open space to recharge groundwater,” said Renata Brillinger, executive director of the Sebastopol-based organization CalCAN. “We are united in our commitment to protecting our local, organic family farms.”
Similarly, Wendy Krupnick, president of the Sonoma County chapter of Community Alliance with Family Farms, observed, “If this measure passes, individuals, restaurants and school cafeterias won’t stop buying poultry and dairy products. And they shouldn’t. These are important parts of many people’s diets,” adding that local consumers should have the choice to buy local products from family-owned farms versus imports from corporations outside Sonoma County.
Some records knock one out at first listen. That is especially the case with Sonoma County’s very own Laceration, who just released I Erode, a nine-song platter on boutique independent metal label 20 Buck Spin records.
At its core, the band consists of Luke Cazares on rhythm guitars and vocals, and lead guitar on “Dreams Of The Formless”; Donnie Small on lead and rhythm guitars; Aerin Johnson on drums; and Eli Small on bass. Before heading out on a short 10-date tour with Molten, the band will play most of their new record at their upcoming local album-release show.
Fans may remember the group issued Demise (2021), which cemented the band as one of the most menacing death-metal quartets around.
Thankfully, their latest platter of splatter crushes anything in its wake. As heard on tracks like “Excised,” “Sadistic Enthrallment,” “Carcerality” and the ridiculously heavy title track, this band has done their homework and upped the ante for the local metal scene in the process. With influences ranging from Morbid Angel to Morgoth and Demolition Hammer to Suffocation, this nauseatingly heavy record is sure to land on many Top 10 year-end lists.
We caught up with Luke Cazares to talk about the scene and all things Laceration.
Bohemian: How did the record deal come together with 20 Buck Spin records?
Luke Cazares: We noticed there was an interest in what we were doing after we put out our 2021 debut, Demise, on Rotted Life Records. We were already huge fans of 20 Buck Spin as a label and for its own affiliated bands, so we quickly recorded a demo track of some new material and sent it to their office. That got the conversations going. Today, we are part of the best death-metal label roster in the world and couldn’t be happier.
Bohemian: Did you pick the bands for your record release party at Arlene Francis?
Cazares: Yes, we normally hand-pick show line-ups, as it’s a collaborative effort between us and Bitter End Booking. We like to bring killer bands through Santa Rosa as much as we can. As opposed to years ago, we now have great underground support that continually needs to be fed and perpetuated.
Bohemian: What other local bands are you also into, from any genre?
Cazares: There are lots of sick bands we love locally here like Vile Rites, Coffin Hunters, Burning Palace, Hexen House, Supplex and New Low, to name but a few.
Bohemian: Will there be more touring, aside from the handful of dates listed so far? Are you getting correspondence from other countries to visit and play?
Cazares: Definitely. We have some cool stuff planned for 2025 already. There has certainly been talk to play abroad. We send merchandise all over the world, and especially in Europe, so touring outside of the U.S. is something we definitely plan to do. It’s only a matter of time.
Bohemian: Were there any songs or riffs that didn’t make the record? Any plans to re-record your earliest stuff in a live setting?
Cazares: We have a lot of riffs on the back burner and will apply what we can as future material. We did initially toy with the idea of re-recording some older tracks from 2010 for this record, but decided to issue all-new music.
Bitter End Booking presents Laceration’s ‘I Erode’ album release show with Hemotoxin, Burning Palace and Aseptic at The Arlene Francis Center, located at 99 6th St. in Santa Rosa. Doors open at 6pm, show at 7pm on Saturday, Aug. 10. Tickets are $15 in advance and available online at bit.ly/laceration-i-erode. All ages are welcome. Listen to ‘I Erode’ at 20buckspin.bandcamp.com/album/i-erode.
In many respects, Postmodern Jukebox could only exist today with a perfectly-matched blend of elements coming into harmony over the past decade.
The performers lie at the heart of that, though quite a number of them can claim at least adjunct membership in the project these days. The sounds those players make isn’t limited to one style; PMJ’s set lists vary wildly across genres, from western swing to traditional jazz to big band to ’60s soul.
Video, though! That’s the way in which the group has truly grown, with a consistent output to YouTube capturing millions of views. As of press time, the project—per Wikipedia: “a rotating musical collective founded by New York based pianist Scott Bradlee in 2011”—had released over 400 videos on YouTube alone, with more than 6 million subscribers on that service. The Thursday video release on YouTube routinely scores PMJ hundreds of thousands of hits, with songs that top the million mark a regular occurrence.
At the heart of the PMJ project sits musician and arranger Bradlee, who is frequently featured in the group’s videos, which highlight hits from across the decades, almost always done in a retro style that both defies and complements the original song. With guest vocalists the rule, PMJ updates tracks from the past handful of decades, across a wide variety of styles.
In recent months, the band covered the Cure and Miley Cyrus, Morgan Wallen and Billy Joel, the Weeknd and the Bee Gees. In each case, the original version of the song was matched with an approach that would surely surprise fans of the original. A great example of that is KISS’ “I Was Made for Loving You,” played by PMJ in a spaghetti western soundtrack style, with vocalist Effie Passero on lead vocals.
During the stretch of autumn 2023 video releases, Chloe Feoranzo returned to the PMJ fold. She’s been featured in the band as both a live, touring player and as a guest vocalist on videos. In October she covered the Depeche Mode classic, “Enjoy the Silence,” giving the song a 1920s Jazz Age sheen. It racked up about a half-million views within the first two weeks of airing.
Feoranzo’s performed with the group on an irregular basis for the past few years. And though she’s not taking a heavy role in this summer’s touring, she’s well-versed in what the group does and guests with the group from time to time.
For the session that birthed “Enjoy the Silence,” she said Bradlee offered up a handful of tracks she might wish to sing on—with her clarinet-playing also well-featured on the track. Once she decided on “Enjoy the Silence,” she was flown from her home in Los Angeles to Nashville. There, about 20 minutes outside of town, she joined the ensemble that would be featured on the track, working with them to whip it into shape at Bradlee’s state-of-the-art home audio and video studio.
A traditional player at heart, Feoranzo said, “I have rarely brought a song to the table, but for the ‘Dancing With Myself’ video, I did suggest it. I love Billy Idol, and thought it was a fun one to try. Scott usually gives you a list to choose from. And with Depeche Mode, I thought ‘Enjoy the Silence’ would be one that would work best for my style.”
She added that everything about the experience has become finely honed. The production studio moved around the country until Bradlee’s property became the PMJ headquarters.
“They have a studio on the property that’s always set up,” she said. “There are instruments and background curtains, an entire studio dedicated to doing videos. When I did ‘Enjoy,’ Scott sent me a scratch recording of him playing it on the piano. I memorized the song—the lyrics and chords—and got a feel of it, and we went through it a few times.
“Then it was time to try on a costume. We took about seven or eight takes. The interesting thing about being a part of Scott’s videos is that nothing’s ever overdubbed. If the take is messed up, we start over again. What you see is what you get. I know that there’s some audio tweaking, but that’s just adjusting levels and such; the core take is live,” Feoranzo continued.
In running through dozens of songs a year, the band has a massive catalog of material from which to choose, and players are brought in who can master it. Just as the sounds are generally plucked from the 1980s through today, the styles they play range from the 1920s into the 1960s, a challenging thing for even the keenest players.
Feoranzo said, “I have been taking a step back from the longer touring. I did release that video with them and have been doing smaller tours. Like, I got a sub call earlier this year to go out for a few days.”
Not unlike some of the barnstorming troupes of the mid-20th century, she said that the PMJ machinery is so well-honed that “they have one, or even two tours happening at once here in the U.S. and overseas. Each of these tours can involve a cast and crew of about 15 members, or about as many people as you can fit on a bus.”
Though musicians are obviously booked for that role, she suggested that the nature of the beast is such that they wind up behind the merch table. The band’s emcee—who helps keep the show moving on-stage while engaging the audience by highlighting the best-dressed members—might be one of the tour managers. It’s an all-hands-on-deck type of experience, played to an audience that crosses many demographics.
Or, as Feoranzo said, “It’s a wide range of ages for sure, and people who’re happy to go out for an evening.”
Feoranzo said she’s open to guesting on upcoming videos and would consider further touring, though she’s busy with a pair of groups in Los Angeles: the Pino Noir Quartet and the Jessica Fichot Quartet. She also plays dates on the road with the Shake ’Em Up Jazz Band, a group she joined during her pre-Covid era living in New Orleans.
She said, though, that even when she’s not an active, touring participant of PMJ, she knows the group has put up a video featuring her on one platform or another.
“They’ve been able to master the video portion of the business,” she noted. “They have that part of the equation down pat. They share videos all of the time. Every few hours, they’re posting and reposting videos.”
She recalled that a previous video of hers was re-released through Instagram, with the quick reel adding a black-and-white filter to the original clip.
“And all of a sudden it went crazy,” Feoranzo said. “It had like 2.5 million views. From an old video. I was getting all sorts of followers on Instagram, which was weird, but not an unusual thing. But the Depeche Mode video hadn’t come, and the timing wasn’t lining up. But because PMJ had slapped a filter on it, Instagram went crazy for a day and a half.”
Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox performs 7pm on Sunday, Aug. 18, outside at The Meritage Resort, 850 Bordeaux Way, Napa. Doors open at 5:30pm. Tickets available online at bit.ly/pomojukebox.
This piece is more timely than I intended. Scheduled for a few days before Corazon Healdsburg’s Saturday, Aug. 10, fundraising gala at Bacchus Landing, this falls a week after the starting success of a vineyard workers’ protest in Healdsburg.
That march, organized by the Santa Rosa-based Jobs With Justice, rallied 600 farmworkers and their supporters around demands for hazard pay, disaster wage insurance and a base wage of $250 per ton of grapes harvested.
For context, while market price varies per year per varietal, that is equal to or less than a 10th of the price of a ton of grapes. Jobs With Justice promises additional protests and strikes as the fall grape harvest looms. Separate from and kindred to Jobs With Justice, its partner, Corazón Healdsburg, exists to protect the basic rights of farm workers and uplift their families with wraparound work, housing, food, health, legal and education services. I spoke recently with Marcy Flores, director of Corazon Healdsburg.
CH: Marcy, tell us about the people that you serve.
MF: We support communities that live and work in the areas of Windsor, Healdsburg, Geyserville and Cloverdale. Predominantly monolingual Spanish speakers. Farmworkers, restaurant workers, hotel workers, stay-at-home mothers and children in our public schools.
CH: That sounds like the very economic basis of the tourist wine industry centered in Healdsburg. I understand that these families are typically of mixed legal status—some are citizens, some DACA recipients, some undocumented. My understanding is that Corazon largely operates as a trusted confidential middleman for people uncertain of their rights or unable to protect them for fear of retribution. Is that correct?
MF: Yes, definitely. And fear plays a big role. Whether it is in seeking safe employment conditions or owed wages, renter’s rights or food assistance, people are afraid to ask for what they deserve. There was a lot of fear during disasters like the fires and Covid, when families badly need help and are afraid to ask for it.
CH: Wow. I understand that to provide holistic care, you enlist or refer to a great many organizational partners.
MF: Yes, too many to count! Last year, just in our academic services department, we had over 60 partners. At the end of the day, it’s all about the community we make.
Learn more. Listen to my full interview with Marcy Flores. Hear about the pre-K-through-college educational program, listening sessions, fiestas and the reform movement. Follow the links to volunteer, donate or buy tickets to their gala, Aug. 10.
Local sports teams can now enjoy baseball, soccer and lacrosse without the risk of ankle-twisting gopher holes, along with other new features at Maxwell Farms Regional Park in the city of Sonoma, park officials said Thursday.
New sports fields, improved parking and enhanced ADA access have been completed at the 82-acre park at 100 Verano Ave. in the vicinity of Boyes Hot Springs, Sonoma County Regional Parks announced.
The updates include all-weather sports fields for baseball, soccer and lacrosse, new restroom buildings and expanded parking with more ADA-accessible spaces, and new EV charging stations. The new sports fields feature artificial turf, significantly reducing safety issues of the previous grass fields—such as ankle-twisting gopher holes.
Visitors of all abilities can now access the sports fields, playground, picnic areas and fan seating via new ADA-accessible pathways. This is the first phase of updates at the park.
Construction on this first phase began in fall 2022, following a $3 million allocation by the Board of Supervisors. Completed Phase 1 construction totals $9.3 million. Other funding sources include State grants ($2.5 million), Parks For All – Measure M ($2.7 million), Sonoma Valley area park mitigation fees ($267,000), disabled access improvements funds ($187,000) and Sonoma County Parks Foundation ($180,000).
Three-quarters of Napa Valley’s farmworkers are parents, refuting the perception that the workforce is dominated by younger, single men, according to a county assessment.
Most Napa County farmworkers are women and men either living with their children or supporting two households—one for their children and a second near their work, Napa County Supervisor Joelle Gallagher said Friday, citing results of the Napa County Farmworker Housing Needs and Impacts Assessment Report.
The Napa Valley wine industry, which accounts for over 25% of California’s wine revenues, employs about 9,000 farmworkers, according to the report. About 40% work in Napa County year-round, and 60% work there eight to 11 months a year.
The Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office is investigating after a pipe bomb was found inside a mailbox over the weekend near Ukiah.
The suspicious device was found about 11:05am on Saturday, in the mailbox of a home in the 4600 block of Burke Hill Drive.
A sheriff’s deputy and his K-9, both certified in detecting explosives, examined the device and determined it had explosive materials.
The device was rendered safe and disposed of by the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office Bomb Squad. Remnants were collected for evidence for identification using DNA of whoever made the bomb.
“At this time, there is no evidence the device was placed with intent to harm a specific person or property for any specific reason,” the Sheriff’s Office said.
Anyone with information about the incident is asked to call the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office Dispatch Center at 707.463.4086.
A new subculture has been quietly brewing worldwide for the past 15 years, and it’s arrived in a town nearby.
Its adherents, known as wastelanders, ascribe to a creative aesthetic primarily influenced by the post-apocalyptic Mad Max film franchise, and their scene is unofficially known as the wasteland scene.
The wasteland scene, named loosely after Wasteland Weekend, the yearly event that bonds wastelanders into a somewhat-cohesive group, finds its roots with the release of the first, self-titled Mad Max movie in 1979, and has gained steam ever since. With Mad Max, director and “mastermind” George Miller kicked off an epic saga that includes, in addition to the aforementioned movie, The Road Warrior (1981) and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985), Fury Road (2015) and Furiosa (2024).
Together, the five films span 45 years in realtime and about the same in movietime—long enough for the industrial world to sputter and stop, and for a new, scrappy world to emerge in its bleak wastes.
Within the ochre-hued Australian Outback, reluctant hero and ex-cop Max Rockatansky, and in later movies, Imperator Furiosa, encounter a rogue’s gallery of leather-clad desperados whose hardscrabble scramble for survival drives them to battle each other on the world’s last roads in smoke-spewing, supercharged war machines at 90 miles per hour.
In the ruined landscape of tomorrow, cars symbolize power, and gasoline is far more precious than water. In its simplest form, the wasteland is today’s equivalent of the Wild West, with motorcycles and gasoline replacing horses and water, and marauders replacing bandits. Freedom, adventure and giddy lawlessness remain its most basic attractions.
Importantly, the wasteland, though bleak and unforgiving, is also beautiful in its own way, filled with costumes and vehicles exquisitely hand-crafted out of priceless recycled Old World detritus. A highway sign becomes a prized shield, camera lens parts become goggle eyepieces, and a toilet seat and an exhaust pipe become a flame-throwing guitar. As creator George Miller himself once said, “Just because it’s a wasteland doesn’t mean that people don’t make beautiful things.”
Wasteland Weekend
In 2009, the first Wasteland Weekend event took place, in California’s Mojave desert. A handful of people attended. By the time I found my way there in 2012, about 500 people showed up. The event, held a mile or so off a potholed highway-to-nowhere near Edwards Air Force Base, exuded the raw artistic vibes of an underground pop-up punk party. I instantly fell in love with it.
When Fury Road debuted in 2015, after a three-decade delay, interest in the franchise—and Wasteland Weekend—exploded. A new, younger generation of post-apocalyptic aficionados emerged, and the term “wastelander” gained general acceptance in the community.
Now in its 15th year, with its own festival site located near California City, an estimated 5,000 attendees descend upon Wasteland Weekend every September. For five brutally hot, dusty days, they inhabit a themed, pop-up “Wasteland City” in post-apocalyptic costumes, bartering homemade goods, hitching rides on soot-spewing hot rods, dancing to live music at the free Wreck Room lounge and other venues and, importantly, earning their “wasteland” names. Many form tribes, reconnecting with their “dirt family” at each event.
People journey from across the globe to attend the event, though the majority of attendees live in the United States, and most of those in California. Roughly 20 reside in Sonoma County. In late May, the Sonoma clan gathered at Santa Rosa’s Airport Stadium 12 movie theater to watch the latest Mad Max movie, Furiosa. I later interviewed several of them for this article.
‘Dogtown’
Randle “Dogtown” Moore, 55, of Santa Rosa, is not the average wastelander—but who is? No two wastelanders are alike, and that’s kind of the point. The wasteland scene is a space for crafters, scoot-jockeys, survivalists and movie fanatics to let loose with their creativity, each in their unique way.
On a recent Thursday, I caught up with Dogtown in his backyard workshop. A gifted artist, he began attending Wasteland Weekend in 2019. He hooked up with a Sacramento tribe called the Dead Crows for a few years, but plans to switch things up this September. “I’m taking a sabbatical for a year, and I’m building my own camp, doing my own thing,” he said. “A juke-joint-’50s-soda-bar-sock-hop place.”
Dogtown plans to showcase “swing, blues, all that old-timey stuff”—with some vintage punk music thrown in—and is designing portable walls which he will wallpaper with laminated punk band fliers. He even managed to obtain a case of old-time Moxie soda for the bar. His current project? Configuring an antique jukebox to hold all the songs.
Dogtown’s Mad Max roots date back to junior high in the early ’80s, when his brother-in-law took him to see The Road Warrior. He liked the movie so much he brought his friends to see it. “We played D&D (Dungeons & Dragons); we were role players,” he said. “So I took the game system rules and applied it to the Mad Max world, and we started playing what we called Road Warrior, which was a post-apocalyptic D&D-style game.”
A few years later, they formed a punk biker “gang” and rode around sporting movie-accurate “MFP” (Main Force Patrol) police patches on their jackets. Dogtown still owns his original denim vest, which he upgraded with fur and hand-painted artwork and now wears in the wasteland.
These days, he creates and sells patches and candles deifying the Mad Max movie characters. He’s also working on a tome of sorts, a leather book filled with colored drawings of the Mad Max characters and their pithy quotes.
BATTLE BUG Randle ‘Dogtown’ Moore’s street-legal VW Bug was assembled from a ’73 body, a ’79 engine and a ’65 front end. It sports a roof hatch, a cowcatcher, gas cans and armored window screens.
But perhaps Dogtown’s most eye-catching wasteland creation is the Battle Bug, a ’65/’73/’79 VW Beetle in need of such repair when he bought it that he rebuilt it using parts of three different Bugs. After considerable work, it now boasts a roof hatch, a cowcatcher, all-terrain tires and armored window screens. Sometimes, when strangers approach him at Wasteland Weekend to tell him how cool it is, Dogtown tosses them the keys and tells them to take it for a spin.
‘DeathstarSamovar’
Kimric Smythe, 62, of Petaluma, arrived in the wasteland via a cosmically convoluted path. After a childhood split between Pakistan, Somalia and Santa Cruz, and following a stint in the Air Force, he arrived in San Francisco in the late ’80s. There, he hooked up with numerous underground art scenes, including the legendary Cacophony Society and Survival Research Labs (SRL).
An inventor and tinkerer by nature, Smythe wore many hats over the years, some official—doing quality assurance for a tech company, making costumes at a costume company, studying solar and alternative energy—and some decidedly unofficial, like assisting with the construction of giant destructive robots and serving as the de facto fireworks guy for Burning Man in its early years.
“I would wear nine pounds of fireworks on giant pinwheels, and do these performances,” he said, adding that he still coordinates large-scale art installation demolition-burns at Black Rock City.
When Burning Man grew too large for Smythe’s liking, he gravitated to the steampunk scene before entering the wasteland in 2015. For the last 30 years, he’s owned Smythe’s Accordion Center, now the last accordion repair/sales shop in the Bay Area, but he also sells handmade functional armor, made out of street signs, in his Etsy store, DeathstarSamovar.
“Everything’s fucking riveted by hand,” he told me when I visited his house, gesturing towards a box of armor pauldrons. “There’s no plastic. I even dye and stain the fabric before I do the padding.” He described how he hammers the rivets out of metal game tokens and uses antique leather accordion straps and buckles from the ’30s and ’40s, adding, “I do custom work, too.”
DEATHSTARSAMOVAR Kimric Smythe, of Petaluma, fabricates high-quality, functional armor out of street signs, which he sells at his Etsy store. Here he models his personal wasteland costume, replete with Samurai helmet and armored boots.
Several years ago, Smythe helped fabricate a motorized wasteland-mobile out of street signs, and both he and it are now familiar sights at Wasteland Weekend and other events.
But by my estimation, Smythe’s most intriguing creation is the homemade portable air-conditioning unit sitting on his living room table. It fits inside a vintage, Flipper-blue tool-box-cum-backpack. Under his direction, I started the mysterious unit with the flick of a switch and waited for it to begin blowing warm air out of its tiny exhaust pipe. Then I donned a hand-fabricated vest lined with plastic medical tubing, strapped the backpack to my back and connected its tubing to the vest’s … and proceeded to cool down.
My only thought was: I could be king of the wasteland. I removed the entire contraption and left Smythe’s house with his parting words ringing in my ears: “The batteries last six to eight hours.”
‘Rad Max’
If ever anyone was born to be a wastelander, surely it is Max “Rad Max” Braun, 32, of Santa Rosa, whose father actually named him after the eponymous movie character himself, “Mad” Max Rockatansky. Rad Max made his first Mad Max costume in fourth grade, out of cardboard and duct tape, because he couldn’t find any black leather garments that fit him. Then he stepped his game up and in 2015, with the release of Fury Road, made his first real costume.
Cosplay runs in Rad Max’s veins. “I really like the costuming,” he said. “I wish Wasteland [Weekend] was the only fandom I invested a bunch of time and effort in, but I also do Halo costuming, Star Wars, Red Dead … a little bit of everything.”
As I photographed him in a warehouse during our interview, he described how he ages fabrics, creates faux-metal out of plastic, and makes faux-leather out of foam rubber and fabric to produce a wasteland look. But his wasteland revolver, welded out of scrap metal and bullet shells, took the cake for sheer ingenuity.
Rad Max’s devotion to the wasteland scene verges on legendary—and not just because of his screen-accurate costumes for all five Mad Max movies, including three versions for Fury Road alone. He also lives in a wasteland household, with his wastelander wife and two other longtime wastelander friends.
Their first year at Wasteland Weekend, in 2017, they formed their viking-themed, post-apocalyptic tribe called Children of Aesir, which counts 8-10 members at any given time. They built a portable wooden longhouse, which they transport to Wasteland City and assemble on-site each year.
“We’ve invested in trucks and trailers and storage,” he said. “We also drive in a convoy.”
He added, “I always bring a Mad Max costume every year. There’s probably a good amount of people [at Wasteland Weekend] that haven’t seen the movies. They’re either Burners or just festival goers. And I want to keep that spirit alive.”
This past May, Rad Max attended a Furiosa pre-screening at San Francisco’s AMC Metreon 16 IMAX theater with 30-odd other costumed wastelanders and a crowd of influencers and reviewers. As Rad Max tells it, one reviewer described the wasteland contingent as a scary, intense group of people who yelled and screamed and riled up the crowd. But as soon as the movie started, they transformed into the quietest and most respectful members of the audience.
DEATH DART Writer Mark Fernquest’s stripped-down wasteland motorbike, a kid’s Honda 70, reaches speeds of up to 40 mph in the irradiated deep-desert sand of the Mojave Desert.
End Game
Rumors abound that George Miller, now 79 years old, may yet direct one more Mad Max movie. The screenplay exists, and its title is, take a wild guess: The Wasteland.
My fellow wastelanders and I hope Warner Bros. greenlights the project. If and when The Wasteland’s release date is ever announced, we’ll all count the days till we can watch it on the silver screen.
But regardless, the epic Mad Max saga already contains enough post-apocalyptic inspiration to fuel the wasteland scene into the foreseeable—and dare I say post-apocalyptic?—future. New wasteland events keep popping up all across the United States, and in Europe and Australia. But that is a story for another day.
Perhaps Rad Max summed up the wasteland scene best when he said, “It’s a way of life for wastelanders, where it’s gone past the movies, and now we do our own thing.”
Einstein said that God doesn’t play dice with the universe, but we can assume that playful and anarchic surrealist Salvador Dali did. Ditto his portraitist, 25-year-old Santa Rosa artist Mauricio Jojoa, who just took top honors in Sonoma County Fair’s Fine Arts competition for his image made entirely of dice. The work won First Place and “Best of Show” in the Adult Fine Arts department.
Originally from Colombia, Jojoa specializes in tattoo and street art. His winning Dali portrait was his first time using dice. That said, he also recently made a painting from corks that he cut and painted by hand. With so many mediums at one’s disposal, why choose?
“Before thinking about Dali’s work of dice, I was thinking about how to build an image made of dots. I tried pointillism with white marker, scratching paper, Notan art, but none of them would impress anyone,” says Jojoa. “At first I thought about dominoes, but doing some sketches didn’t work.”
Then, while watching his parents play a game with dice in his home country of Colombia, the idea came to him. Some computer experimentation followed, which convinced Jojoa the project was feasible. He ordered 8,000 dice from China (where he could obtain them inexpensively) and waited two months for them to arrive before commencing the project.
“The process at first was very risky because when you do something so big you spend a lot of money and you don’t know if it will turn out well,” says Jojoa, who spent an additional two months composing the piece using his computer model as a guide.
“The image of Salvador Dali that I made in the painting is the image that I use whenever I am going to start a project that I am not sure is going to work. I know the photo very well. I have tattooed it; I have sculpted it. I have painted it a thousand times, and I feel very comfortable working with his face,” says Jojoa, who is a fan of Dali’s paintings, including “The Temptation of St. Anthony” and “Portrait of My Dead Brother,” which is similarly composed of dots and a direct inspiration.
“Since I was little, I have loved art—it is the first time that I will say that I love to work,” he says. “I dedicate 100% of my heart to it… This is the first time I have won something.”
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A new subculture has been quietly brewing worldwide for the past 15 years, and it’s arrived in a town nearby.
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Einstein said that God doesn’t play dice with the universe, but we can assume that playful and anarchic surrealist Salvador Dali did. Ditto his portraitist, 25-year-old Santa Rosa artist Mauricio Jojoa, who just took top honors in Sonoma County Fair’s Fine Arts competition for his image made entirely of dice. The work won First Place and “Best of Show”...
