[Discussed: Cinema, comedy, aging, touring, human innerconectivity, real estate, genre, improvisation, parents, Green Day’s Dookie, etc.]
You’ve likely encountered Carlos Gonzalez’s work, even if you didn’t know it at the time. Gonzalez is so prolific that his style often precedes him. His trademark scrawl, originally seen in his comics like Slime Freak, Test Tube and Scab County, has been mimicked on underground flyers and cassette covers for over a decade. But there is no mistaking these imitations for the real thing. His visual work is crude, immediate, and distinct.
Gonzalez’s music, tirelessly performed and released as Russian Tsarlag, is similarly skeletal. He makes narcotic bedroom pop at its most haunted and bare. The constituent parts of a pop song are there, but unadorned, and surprisingly beautiful that way.
Live, Tsarlag’s performances somehow move seamlessly between hushed songs, surreal performance, and standup comedy. I’ve watched him silence a barful of boisterous drunks using little more than a green light and a plastic bag. He has a way of forcing a sense of intimacy in places it does not belong.
In his movies, Gonzalez tells bizarre, often hilarious genre tales using little more than a handheld video camera, primitive light- ing, and a few friends as actors. These films operate with the intimacy and economy of a home movie, but they take on stories that are Hollywood in scope: classic character tales gone wrong, rich in mood and improvised dialogue. Their low fidelity doesn’t mask a lack of content. Instead, the movies entertain; they deliver, like many of their director’s spoken or assumed influ- ences: Alfred Hitchcock, Martin Scorcese, David Lynch, B-grade horror films, etc. It’s pulp storytelling at its most elemental and strange.
Gonzalez does not need a budget to perform a sleight of hand; his transmissions always reach the audience on his terms. Viewers are quickly swallowed up by his peculiar language, willing and eager to follow the films’ often languid pace to whichever eerie or lovely side road it may lead. We forget that we are watch- ing Gonzalez’s friends, barely costumed, on his couch. The liv- ing room itself becomes a sound stage, floating in empty space. Our eyes, transfixed, blot out the periphery, like those of dazed campers gazing into a fire. Gonzalez is the disembodied speak- er’s face, muttering into an upturned flashlight in the dark.
Given his prolific nature and enduring influence, most of these statements are probably obvious or redundant to you, the read- er. By the time I write this, Carlos will have quietly released some new and brilliant content into the world. The intent of this introduction is not to sell the artist’s worth, or to summarize his style, though I’ve lazily, attempted both. Instead, it is a reminder not to take it for granted. Gonzalez offers an antidote to a culture of immediacy, to browsing, streaming paralysis.
I spoke to Carlos in his backyard in Providence, Rhode Island, in 2019.
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Maybe I could just begin by asking what you’ve been working on most recently. I know you’ve been on a tour, but I don’t know what your focus has been this summer or even this year otherwise.
This summer since the tour I’ve mostly been draw- ing comics. I’m slowly trying to start a new story. It’s loosely based on the cyberpunk genre, William Gibson and that kind of stuff, but it’s also just some guy drinking in a bar, too. And there’s a side virtu- al reality kind of thing going on. But I’ve just been working on that mostly. Me and Bridget were play- ing some music--we do a thing called Cream Candles. She’s more free in the summer, so we were jamming a lot more regularly. She works with disabled people and she’s also going to school, so during the school year she’s pretty busy with work and school. During the summer she’s a little more free.
Have you been working on film stuff?
Not this summer, but I finished a feature length video in the spring. I’m showing it in New York on the 27th. It’s called Antenna to God. And it’s this journalist lady, she’s researching a new article she wants to write. She’s kind of like a rising star or something. She meets this chiropractor, and he offers to do some work on her. She thinks there might be a story there, that it might be a good avenue to go down. So she starts getting chiropracting done on her, and her personality starts to kind of shift, and her editor starts to get kind of worried about her. And he sort of plays a detective in a way, trying to figure out what’s the real deal behind this chiropractor, what’s going on and why she’s acting so weird.
Is she upfront about being a journalist?
Yeah, but it’s also legitimate work getting done on her. And it gets sort of convoluted after that. [Laughs.]
When you’re starting a storyline, is genre something you think of as a frame?
Yeah, definitely. I think that’s one of the things that kind of handy about genre. You kind of have a skeleton, you have these tropes, and then you can go off. They’re just kind of a starting point or a launch pad for, hopefully, something that seems original or personal. So yeah, whether it’s like a western thing or science fiction or horror or or mystery—I love all that stuff, and the longer you live you sort of soak in all these stories and these, like---guy with a flashlight going through the basement and he finds the one piece of evidence, or something like that [panto- mimes.] Or the shootout in a western. And it’s cool to put those against something that’s really weird. Something very familiar and something kind of unsettling, or completely stupid. I think that can clash, but it can also be complimentary.