(While HoW devotes a lot of attention to the traditional forms of pop culture, we also try to keep an eye on what new forms are evolving on the internet. For example, Flash Animation creates short-form movies that some websites use as a jazzy way to lead you to their homepage, while others use it to make brief comedic movies or interactive games.
Flash has also become used to bring editorial cartoons to life on the web; Mark Fiore of The Village Voice and Salon.com (amongst others) is one such example. But at HoW, we came across a whole string of these politically-oriented Flash movies grouped into what was called “the Question Mark Campaign.” They appeared on the Blah3.com site, maintained by someone identified as “Stranger,” and were often discussed on a variety of political bulletin boards, such as the Bartcop Forum and the Democratic Underground.
At HoW, we were intrigued by this effort to build up a unified work out of these short movies, at last count totaling 30 in number--you can click on the images in this article to see some samples. They address many of the issues that have arisen in the post 9/11 world, and they do so in an engaging and creative blend of quotations, pictures and music. We were also amazed by the rapid spread of these movies through the internet--in the space of a few months, the Question Mark movies have gotten the attention of major political campaigns and the Democratic National Committee. We contacted Blah3 to learn more about what Flash Animation had to offer as a medium for this message--Eds.)
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So should we refer to you as “Stranger,” or “American Stranger”? I’ve seen both handles used. A lot of people prefer anonymity on the internet, especially when getting involved in politically charged topics.
You can use Stranger, as that’s kind of the moniker that has stuck at this point on Bartcop and Democratic Underground (although where Blah3.com is involved, most people there know me as ‘Editor’). The name ‘American Stranger’ comes from a song I wrote immediately after the suicide of Kurt Cobain, who is one of my rock heroes. I tend to gravitate toward those tragic figures (Cobain, Brian Jones, Stiv Bators) for some reason mainly because they seem more heroic than someone like David Lee Roth, who outlives his 15 minutes and refuses to leave.
The name ‘Stranger’ suits me fine--it sums up the way I feel about what I do, because to most of the people who read my blog or see my movies, I am a stranger. And the Heinlein reference is kinda cool, too--because over the past two years, I sure feel like a stranger in a strange land sometimes.
I get a lot of emails from people who want to know my identity. It’s no big secret--any determined person could find out who I am in five minutes if they knew where to look. And I wouldn’t really even care if they did--I’m a big boy, and I grew up in a neighborhood where you had to learn to fight or you were dead meat so I can take care of myself. If I didn’t have a relationship with someone I love and want to protect, I’d be inviting a lot of my antagonists over for fist fights on the lawn. But I do care about my beloved K very deeply and wouldn’t want to subject her to that, so I remain as anonymous as I can.
Are there any touchstones or “role models” that shape your approach in doing these Flash movies? I think of the Adbusters and “culture jamming,” for example, in the general sense of taking things out of popular culture and reshaping them to a new purpose. Or, to get even more esoteric, one could bring up the Situationists and their notion of “détournment,” a kind of hijacking of cultural forms. This was a big thing Greil Marcus got into in his book on punk (and other things), Lipstick Traces.
My inspirations are more old-school than punk, yet younger than the Situationists, although all of the people I’m about to cite probably took cues from the Situationists, and the punks probably took some cues from them in turn. I was a big fan of Marshall McLuhan and, to a lesser extent, R. Buckminster Fuller--I grew up in a time when we were still on the cusp of becoming an ‘information society’, when you still had to wait for the Six O’clock News to get the big news of the day. Both Fuller and McLuhan were both prophetic in that sense--the ‘global village’ has come to be a reality (for good or ill), and ‘the media is the message’ has borne all of the horrible negative connotations that people back then feared it would.
And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Abbie Hoffmann, Jerry Rubin and the YIP. Some of Hoffmann’s tactics were just so outrageous--he was a master at appropriating the icons of the time and twisting them into things that people who normally worshipped those icons hated. Throwing dollar bills onto the floor of the stock exchange was a master stroke. Steal This Book was deviously clever. It took the ‘Establishment’ and used it while trashing all it stood for. And I was an impressionable teen at the point when Hoffmann made his mark--he was as much rock star as he was political activist to me.
Next page: The Question Mark Campaign Begins
