New York Portraits 2010: Nick Zedd and Monica Casanova

This photo was taken when Nick, Monica and I were exhausted. Nick and Monica were both very tired from the endless stress of living in Brooklyn in a flat dealing with a typical mad crazy out of his head greedy New York landlord who wants to drive his tenants to despair.... or something like that. On top of that Monica is pregnant and Nick was ill. I was exhausted from trying to do too much in New York. It was my last night in New York and I had a small going away party. Nick and Monica were surprisingly nice enough to come to it and this was the last chance to take a photo of the both of them, that I desperately wanted to do. We ended up at the Yaffa Cafe with red lights looking like a Mexican brothel. I do like the Mexican bullfighter painting in the background. This is a red lit enhanced photo with a kind of hyper reality. I hope they like it. I mean this is for the lord of East Village underground cinema who wrote the Cinema of Transgression Manifesto. At the end of this posting, it is printed in it's entirety.I first met Nick ages ago in the East village while he was filming one of his East Village shocker films, but I remet Nick last October again. He is also an artist. An excellent artist in fact and I had the pleasure of being in the Club 57 Art show with him. That is where I met his dazzling partner Monica. Monica is originally from Mexico. Nick and Monica will be escaping the madness of Brooklyn to Mexico. Somehow this is very logical and I wish them both the best!  

I also want to point out that Nick is a film pioneer. Lots of famous filmmakers have used lots of ideas from Nick films. Have you ever wondered what the hell Bruce Willis was talking about in Terantino's film "Pulp Fiction" when he said, "Zedd is dead?"

Nick Zedd has been a leading figure of the 80s Lower East Side Cinema of Transgression. He always felt if the viewer was not shocked after seeing one of his films he was not doing his job. At the same time his films were intense, but beautiful at the same time as being mind altering. What some would call bad taste at that time, nowadays you see in too many films. He worked with amazing underground actors such as Lydia Lunch, Kembra Pfahler, Rockets Redglare, Brenda Bergman, Taylor Mead and so many more. Please click on the highlights above for more detail about his films such as They Eat Scum, Police State, War in Menstrual Envy, Thrust in Me, The Wild World of Lydia Lunch and his intense TV series Electra Elf with Rev. Jen. I will let Nick Speak for himself wth the pasting below of his Manifesto.

Monica Casanova is an underground visual artist and fashion designer living and working in Mexico City and New York. For more than twenty years,she has been a leading figure in the various underground movements in Mexico City. She has worked with rock bands, alternative theater with figures such as Juan Jose Gurrola. She has also performed with Katia Tirado for Ex Teresa Arte Actual (Mexico City). Monica has done several performances as a lady wrestler, transforming it in a new form of art in Arena Mexico. Monica has helped it gain recognition in the multimedia art events, which has led to inspiration for Mexican artists like Laureana Toledo, Francis Alys and Dj Chrysler, who shot Monica as a icon figure.

In New York she has collaborated with Patricia Field making the installations of her famous window displays. The art in Bergdorf Goodman's window displays were  Monica's space of creativity for a year, as well.  She was part of a show in Deitch Project with Kembra Phfaler doing  limited edition pieces of 'hoodies' and 't-shirts' that were sold to several art collectors from New York. Monica has done performances in Susan Bartsch's events with multiple fashion looks that she used to reinvent herself over and over. She has been photographed as part of the fashion icons gang of New York for Paper Magazine. She has been featured as an iconoclast figure in publications such as V Magazine, Paper Magazine, Celeste, Rude Magazine, Black Book, Nylon Japan and Nylon Mexico for which she just received a full interview for their first issue. She also has published her photos in numerous publications. Her last exhibition was held in the Museum of Estonia showcasing Mexican Wrestlers. Monica considers her daughter, Amanita,  her best piece of art.  Amanita is part of the theatrical death rock band The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black.

Cinema of Transgression Manifesto 

by Nick Zedd

We who have violated the laws, commands and duties of the avant-garde; i.e. to bore, tranquilize and obfuscate through a fluke process dictated by practical convenience stand guilty as charged. We openly renounce and reject the entrenched academic snobbery which erected a monument to laziness known as structuralism and proceeded to lock out those filmmakers who possesed the vision to see through this charade. 

We refuse to take their easy approach to cinematic creativity; an approach which ruined the underground of the sixties when the scourge of the film school took over. Legitimising every mindless manifestation of sloppy movie making undertaken by a generation of misled film students, the dreary media arts centres and geriatric cinema critics have totally ignored the exhilarating accomplishments of those in our rank - such underground invisibles as Zedd, Kern, Turner, Klemann, DeLanda, Eros and Mare, and DirectArt Ltd, a new generation of filmmakers daring to rip out of the stifling straight jackets of film theory in a direct attack on every value system known to man. 

We propose that all film schools be blown up and all boring films never be made again. We propose that a sense of humour is an essential element discarded by the doddering academics and further, that any film which doesn't shock isn't worth looking at. All values must be challenged. Nothing is sacred. Everything must be questioned and reassessed in order to free our minds from the faith of tradition.Intellectual growth demands that risks be taken and changes occur in political, sexual and aesthetic alignments no matter who disapproves. We propose to go beyond all limits set or prescribed by taste, morality or any other traditional value system shackling the minds of men. We pass beyond and go over boundaries of millimeters, screens and projectors to a state of expanded cinema. 

We violate the command and law that we bore audiences to death in rituals of circumlocution and propose to break all the taboos of our age by sinning as much as possible. There will be blood, shame, pain and ecstasy, the likes of which no one has yet imagined. None shall emerge unscathed. Since there is no afterlife, the only hell is the hell of praying, obeying laws, and debasing yourself before authority figures, the only heaven is the heaven of sin, being rebellious, having fun, fucking, learning new things and breaking as many rules as you can. This act of courage is known as transgression. We propose transformation through transgression - to convert, transfigure and transmute into a higher plane of existence in order to approach freedom in a world full of unknowing slaves.