I had the surgery this past Tuesday. The staff in the OR agreed to take pictures with my camera for me once I’d been thoroughly konked. I sort of thought they’d be put off by the request, but I guess when your job is to drug another human, slice open his belly, and insert tiny bio-absorbable screens into his muscleage, it’s pretty hard to “weird” you out.

The last two things I remember before going under are the surgeon saying, “I’m putting on Joss Stone,” and then the wacky anesthesiologist with a thick Eastern European accent saying, “I am going to give you the good stuff before you fall asleep since you are an artist. This is not for everybody, just for you the artist. You’ll feel so good on this stuff you’ll come back for to me just for more of this”. I have no idea exactly what I was responding with at this point, but I feel safe in saying it was something to the effect of “yyyyyyeah mannnnnnn let’s parrrrrtyyyyyyy SLURRRRRRRRRR” followed immediately by lights out.

I figured the nurse would take like one or two pictures and that would be that, but she really went for it. I told her beforehand “i don’t care how gnarly it gets, just shoot everything”, but never did I expect a whole roll of film filled with close ups, wide shots, different angles, funny posing, them messing with my drugged-ass, me looking like I am dead, and so on… Stunning. I could not be more proud of her. Keep in mind that this photo shoot does not exist to me.

The next step was three days of recovery at home. I am writing this during the tail end of that. Kinda boring actually. First it hurt like violent stabbing from hell that I cannot even describe, then it hurt less, and soon it will stop hurting completely. Oh, and while I was under, they shaved my pubes off. Total bonus.

Here’s you go.

Here, we asked Jim a few questions about these magical t-shaped garments worn over one’s torso:


Vice: What was the inspiration for such Christmas blasphemy?
Jim Krewson: I really wanted to do something that would stand out at Rob’s flea market because there’s always so much good stuff there. I think a little of my erotic-cake background came out. [Jim founded a New York-based erotic-cake company called Masturbakers -ed.] There were always bad sex puns for the sayings on the cakes. But with these t-shirts I just gave myself license to push it as far as I wanted. I’ve been really down on religion lately too. The shitty artspeak answer would be: “I’m really into exploring the contextual disparities between religion and the perception of societal tradition.”

What do you have against Santa?
I remember somebody years ago saying that in Japan they saw a window display that had a crucified Santa with dwarfs praying to him all around the cross, which made me laugh for like an hour. But it could just be an urban legend, like the Mexican restaurant with the midget wearing a sombrero with chips on the brim and salsa in the top going from table to table and stopping to let you eat. I can’t remember who it was but somebody SWORE they went there while on tour.

What did Santa do to that poor reindeer?
Hij deed een kleine snuifjeroutine!

What’s your favorite thing about Christmas?
Smelling pine trees.

What’s your least favorite thing about Christmas?
Seeing uptight relatives, having a little too much hooch and getting obnoxious, then swearing in front of my niece and nephew. This replays every year and I always feel bad about it afterward. But that’s kind of what uncles are for, right?

And hey, even if you’re not in London, you can order these masterpieces online right now at jimkrewson.com. Do it!

Photo: Keith Newell

Who are you, reading this? A New Yorker? Then you might not care about any of this. You already have art, film, crusties, eight year olds with baseball bats creeping up on you keeping your adrenalin going. But if you’re someone else… maybe if you’re Hawaiian… Jackie and Miles’s films on YouTube, and what they talk about, and how they live, will be like hearing about people eating when you’ve been locked in a glass room by a Russian cop and you’ve had no food, no visitors, just an intravenous drip. Or, like, if you have a house and children. Any way your life got over, the nervous little nonsensical films these lovahs make is your back door out of over.

VICE: What do you call what you guys are? Going out? Going steady?
MILES: What is this, Happy Days?
JACKIE: Yeah, we’re going steady. He was in a band with three different exes. He’d keep on being in a band with a girlfriend and then break up with her and then get another girlfriend and add her to the band. He did that with me.

Will you guys kiss each other while holding your cigarettes up? [nervous laughter] You refuse?
MILES: This is such a weird interview.
JACKIE: Miles doesn’t like PDA.
MILES: It offends the lonely.

Photo: Keith Newell

You should do everything that offends you, or anyone. If you’re an artist. You HAVE to do it now, now that you said you didn’t want to. [They do it for half-a-second then laugh nervously some more.] Did you guys both smoke constantly like this when you met, or did one of you influence the other?
JACKIE: We’re both heavy smokers.

I never see a smoker with a non. They’re always walking together, similarly smoking… re-lighting at the same time. There are less and less of your kind, so when you find each other, you have to hold on tight. You put all those break-up videos on YouTube, and then there was the playing computer-Chess video. That was riveting.
MILES: Hahahaha! We did that the day Michael Jackson died.

LISA:I loved it, because you got all worked up over it. That’s what people DO. Sit around playing video chess. They’re not in high-speed car chases and murdering people all day.In the film where you pretend to be animals, were you drunk or just happy or that’s normal behavior for you?
MILES: We were on a lot of Adderal.
JACKIE: It was really late at night. We had heat madness. His bedroom doesn’t have any windows. He wanted to shoot from all angles. We did it for about 16 hours.

Did you want to quit filming and he kept making you and making you?
JACKIE: Yeah.

You looked sweaty and exasperated, but animal-exasperated, like: “Why won’t you open this door for me?!”
MILES: Jackie thinks people should always be like in that video.
JACKIE: People stage performances at galleries and everyone shows up for it; they ATTEND. It makes it not real or not matter. Instead of if someone just gets on a table randomly and–
MILES: We’re reacting to the death of parlor games. People watch television now, passive.
JACKIE: We always try to play parlor games, or make films or performance or art. It’s hard to find people to collaborate with because even if you present an idea to them, even if you’ve already started, it just seems so awkward to them. They say, “Why?” They don’t recognize it. It doesn’t translate.
MILES: Manhattan, Williamsburg, is like… a mall. A mall of art galleries. I picked Brooklyn because there’s this commune that I wanted to live in. There’s 35 people. Like eight bedrooms.

That would be a nightmare for me. I live with two people in three bedrooms and that’s bad enough. And they’re my children!
MILES: It used to have 60 people. They’re crusties who like drink and cook all day, food that they dumpster-dived.
JACKIE: Cleaning is an impossible task. I stayed there this summer. I’d wake up and do all the dishes, and ten minutes later the sink and counters would be filled and dirty. I’m meticulous and organized. Miles is instinctive and doesn’t judge. He tries to make as many videos as possible and doesn’t care if they’re any good or not.
MILES: Quantity over quality. I want to do a video of stage slaps. Where it devolves into domestic violence. Little mistakes and you end up really slapping someone. The other idea was… I’ve been cutting up pictures of food for the last month. I have a whole box of it… see? It looks like vomit.

Photo: Keith Newell

It does. It also looks like a crazy person’s project.
JACKIE: Especially because that box looks like a retainer case. It really grosses me out.

I like how you edit.
JACKIE: His editing style is him sitting at a computer chain-smoking, editing one little piece for hours.
MILES: It’s all about sounds for me.
JACKIE: Rhythm.
MILES: This girl and I used to sing different songs at the same time and I’d do choppy sound splotches, and now I apply that same technique to [film] montage. Our generation has a weird relationship to the form that art takes because of technology, YouTube, instant, interactive sites — everyone has a participatory part. We’re able to post a comment and so interact with entertainment. Performance art was meant to smash those boundaries, make art participatory, and now it IS already. The avant garde idea of breaking art into everyday life, the death of art…. The goal has been met.

Miles, your premise is just WRONG. Making comments on other people’s videos is not participatory. It’s the same as sitting around talking shit about studio TV shows with your roommates.
MILES: Yeah. Yeah. I was trying to pretend I was Marshall McLuhan for a minute. We could comment more about the dadaists and the fluxus.

You guys ARE dada, so you can’t comment. You can either be the frame, smash the frame, or comment on frame/not frame, right?
MILES: I was hoping I’d come out much smarter.

You’re coming out enthusiastic. Nobody loves art anymore, or thinks about it, or will admit they have ideas about it. Maybe I just think that because I never went to art school and don’t know anyone who does.
MILES: I majored in political philosophy, but I think that’s what avant garde is. I would never want to make propaganda, so I’m not political about content, but I am about form. I’m attracted to theories about form, like what Dick Higgins calls concrete poetry and the dawn of a classless society needs art that isn’t strictly within one form. You wouldn’t just go to a theater and see a play. And Russian montage, Eisenstein, editing through rhythm.

How old are you?
MILES: I’m 22.
JACKIE: I’m 19.

So young and such big ideas! No wonder you smoke so much. It takes energy to free people’s minds… nicotene fuel.
MILES: I don’t really know if I’m freeing people’s minds.

Yes you are.
MILES: Fine.

It’s embarrassing to talk about, but it’s noble. I think people should at least try. People are so mean about other people’s souls; they don’t care.
MILES: It’s all about commodification. People have an aesthetic — gay culture or any subculture — and try to push everything in it, divorced from politics or thoughts about form.
JACKIE: Borrowing the aesthetic but not even know about anything attached to it, what it came out of.
MILES: Appropriation is fine, but if you’re a white college student with dreadlocks who smokes weed, are you actually ever going to stick up for Jamaican people, or are you just going to–
JACKIE: — wear that scarf.
MILES: Yeah, you make a claim with that scarf, but you don’t back it up by sticking up for the PLO.

I didn’t know people were still wearing that scarf. I live in Dover, New Hampshire, so I don’t see much culture — just through my computer screen. On my computer, I see a competition for who can care the least. Who can find something to laugh about that someone else won’t… like child molestation.
MILES: Indifference is THE political stance. Besides nationalism, that’s what this era is breeding: the vacuum of the apolitical. To not believe. They think that’s not political. They think that’s culture. But that IS the politics of the day. Along with attachment to one’s own oppression.

What do you mean by that?
MILES: Like refusing to unionize.
JACKIE: One of my roommates was saying, “I’m not working class.” And she is!
MILES: People try really hard to be normal and, like, helpless, when what they used to do was stand up passionately for what they were and reject oppression. There’s no willingness now for solidarity.
JACKIE: They don’t want to be part of anything, be considered part of anything.

I haven’t heard anyone talk like this since I lived in Europe 20 years ago. Look at you, you’re shaking. It’s because you’re bucking the whole world! Bucking your era. Trying to break form.
MILES: Deleuze called it the body without organs.

So what does it feel like to be 19?
JACKIE: The college I go to, it’s an early college so people drop out of high school and go there from 15 to 17, and my roommates are both 18, so I’m usually around younger people, so I suppose I feel younger than 19. But my younger sister just moved into my bedroom, so I can’t go home and be a child anymore. So this is my house now. [laughs]

Do you worry about money?
JACKIE: I watch him constantly unemployed, so yes, but I’m still supported by my parents for another year.

How do you survive unemployed?
MILES: My rent is $350 a month, so that’s easy to come up with by doing medical tests from the back of The Village Voice. I dumpster food. And Jackie shares food with me. But bakeries put out bags of fresh bread every night, it’s just sitting on the corner. I’m really fascinated by the way Americans consume and discard food.
JACKIE: He always talks about these black mushrooms he’s never had, and foie gras, the most gourmet foods.
MILES: In the Napoleonic code, it’s okay to steal up to $50 of wine, cheese and bread as long as you don’t get caught, and when I lived in New Orleans this guy tried to convince me that law is still in effect.
LISA: Do you go to art openings for the free wine, cheese and crackers?
MILES: They just have free vodka.
JACKIE: There’s never any food. Even supermarkets… there used to be free samples.
MILES: Every once in a while I’ll be a Mystery Shopper.

Do you ever dine and dash?
MILES: No, because then the waitress has to pay for it. It scares me that I would run into the waitress the next day and she’d say, “You owe me eighty dollars

Ever get courted by companies who want you to do camera work for them? They’ll take you out to eat.
MILES: No. That would be awesome.

My friend Darcy used to go on a date for dinner every night. She had about 15 boyfriends.
JACKIE: There’s this escort service my friend does… a man just wants you to go to dinner, but you get paid, too.

But you’d have to have nice clothes, get your hair done.
JACKIE: It depends. There’s this rich gentleman that takes pleasure in taking the most scuzzy girl out.

Photo: Keith Newell

Miles, you could go out with some grandma.
JACKIE: Yeah, just let some old lonely woman take you out and pretend you’re her grandson, look at her old photos.
MILES: That would be disgusting but nice. Do you have a piece of paper? We should write down ideas for the video. You guys should be in it. I wrote down “Buster Keaton, domestic violence, fake expressions of fake pain.”

It’s so much prettier when it’s fake. In the ’90s performance art got more and more into how much can you take, hanging yourself from meathooks by the nipples, and then with extreme sports and extreme everything with reality TV in the ’00s. I’d like to see some slapstick again, choreography, juvenile comedy. There can never be too much food in videos, either. And vomit.
JACKIE: I’ve been watching lots of ’70s Italian horror movies. Dubbed over. I like dubbing a lot.
MILES: Those movies are so stylized.
JACKIE: You see a knife flashing, a black glove. The music is really great, operatic. How do you like living in New Hampshire?

I hate it. I’m court-ordered to stay.
MILES: I love new england. It’s so pretty.

I’ve just been there so long. You know how you’re constantly thinking about food because you don’t know when or how you’re going to get your next meal? Well I’m constantly thinking about escape because I know I can’t be anywhere else, so I’m obsessed with it, even in my dreams. I never even noticed my surroundings before I got trapped. But now it’s constant, seeing my surroundings as walls everywhere… every street, I know it so well. I see into the future, walking down this same street, and I see into the past, when I walked down it so many times before. It looks like an endless, endless street of time.
MILES: My dad was in the army so we moved every year and a half, so I got into this habit of moving.

Me, too. I went back and forth between my parents, and both of them were constantly moving, so it was pretty much a move a season for me. I just kept that up after I left home. Now it’s been years and years I live in Dover. It’s a death sentence to a mutable soul like me. It’s horrifying. I got that move-every-six-months in my blood, and I’m coagulating.
MILES: I’d sort of given up on music, but a few weeks ago I did something with this noise band and I set down the microphone and gave up on singing and I went around whispering things in the audience’s ears. I don’t know what I said, but one guy started fighting me and then everybody started fighting me and I came home and my shirt was totally broken; I had candle-wax on me. That’s the last time I did anything involving owies.
JACKIE: Owies?

Is this what you want to do with your life?
JACKIE: I want to. I don’t know how I could ever make money from it, though.
MILES: Do you think that the sound of the slaps will be too sparse? The slaps themselves could be recorded and separately and made percussive. There’s also the space between the slaps. Sorry this is so boring.

It’s not. I love anal retentiveness about silly stuff and a happy approach to depressing topics.
MILES: [looking up slapping on Wikipedia] “Happy slapping is a fad in which someone assaults a sometimes unsuspecting victim while an accomplice records the assault (commonly with a camera phone). Several incidents are extremely violent, and some victims of “happy-slapping” have even been killed.”
JACKIE: A bunch of girls in high school would do that to a girl in the bathroom.
MILES: It happened to me! A gang of eight year olds behind me slammed me in the back of my head with a baseball bat! They didn’t even rob me. My phone went flying out of my hand. This one really fat guy came running out of the subway and the little kids were like, “Fuck this,” and scattered. This was right outside where I live [in Brooklyn].
JACKIE: Little kids are the people I’m most terrified of in this neighborhood. They’re so rowdy.
MILES: They got so rowdy this summer. They’d stand around the subway going,
“Give me a dollar.” If you said no, they’d follow you. Seven, eight, nine years old. They’re trying to see if they can scare white people.

Are they all black?
MILES: Yeah. This is mostly a Dominican neighborhood, and I never see any Dominican children do that.
JACKIE: Nothing’s creepier than 3 in the morning kids walking around, ten years old, six years old.
MILES: At 4 in the morning I left this party because everybody was on LSD so I got bored, and I saw these two little girls swinging this littler boy around in a circle on a swing set. They were laughing and chanting.

Earlier this year, we heard faint rumblings of a remote Aboriginal township with a heavy metal gang problem. According to reports, Wadeye (population 2,232) was basically run by violent, spear-wielding gangs with names like the the Judas Priest Boys and Evil Warriors. Metal fans from way back, we dropped everything else we were working on and went to see it for ourselves. We stayed there for a week and befriended some of the gangs who took us hunting, to church and even invited us into their homes. We filmed the whole thing and as of today you can watch it on VBS.tv.

Like we explained in our No Photos Issue last year, Craig Dermody is a Melbourne artist who takes existing canvases and uses them as the background for his own, distinctive characters and images. As he told us about the subject matter then: “Basically, the witches conjure up the monsters to fight the peasants, but the peasants give flowers to the monsters to tame them. All the witches want to have sex with the character Chewy so he can tame them to let the monsters go.”

Since then Craig has developed his style and his storylines and his new work is on display now at Somewhere - the newly opened Melbourne store pictured above - which stocks nothing but divine Swedish labels.

Mattias, the approachably hairy guy on the right, is the man responsible and you can see him, as well as Craig’s show, at Lvl 2, Royal Arcade, 314 Little Collins St, Melbourne until Dec 16th.

Mike Sacks is, first and foremost, our friend. He recently wrote an oral history of Over the Edge for our Film Issue. Beyond that he’s an editor and writer for Vanity Fair who published his first book not so long ago, titled And Here’s the Kicker. The book contains interviews with 20 of the funniest writers around, including Bob Odenkirk of Mr. Show, Robert Smigel, Irv Brecher (Marx Brothers), and George Meyer of The Simpsons, and also one interview with David Sedaris. We sat down with Mike Sacks at a coffee house in the East Village of New York to talk about midgets, amusement parks, woofin’ coughs, as well as aliens who have strange allergies.

Please note that the Kindle version, just released, contains a bonus 200 pages of new material, including four interviews not found in the book. We spoke with Sacks about his hilarious new book, and, in celebration of this illustrious interview, we’re holding a contest: The best three photos of readers posing nude with their favorite books will win a signed copy of And Here’s the Kicker! Please note that anyone posing with anything by J.K. Rowling will be immediately disqualified. Email the goods here with the subject line I LIKE TO READ.

Vice: How long did it take you to write this book?
Mike Sacks: From start to finish, a solid two years. I interviewed about 40 writers, and 21 of them made the final cut.

Who was the worst person to interview?
Man, should I really get into that? Is it worth it? Um, there was a writer for a TV show from the 1950s, by the name of Samuel Sarkin. The show was called something like CBS Presents: The Amazing Comedy Hour. I’m forgetting because I didn’t really do too much research on this guy. A friend of his lived down the hallway from my friend, and I got his number and just called.

What was wrong with him?
He screamed at me for a full five minutes or so and then called me a “Sling-a-Ding.”

That sounds rude. But what does that mean?
I have no idea. He also wanted to show me his surgery scars, which he did, but while we were speaking on the phone. He showed the scars to the phone.

Who was the most interesting person you talked with?
A writer for a TV show in the 80s called Welcome to the Gunn House. It was only on a few times, I think in ’85 or ’86, but it was very influential for the writers who were coming up then. The show was about a midget who lived in the woods outside an amusement park. And the midget built an entire world in those woods. Every once in a while, he’d climb through the fence into the amusement park and would get into very strange and funny adventures. It was a crazy show—

You’re making this up!
I am, yes. Or am I? I spoke with the creator of the show, Matt Horan. He hasn’t done much since then, but I wanted to find out exactly how the show got on the air to begin with! I mean, how would that happen? It wouldn’t happen today. Matt’s a real interesting guy. He was in the Army for years and years, was basically kicked out because he kept getting into fights. He always wanted to get into some sort of creative endeavor. He was a painter for awhile; he would only paint naked women on rooftops. One of them was the daughter of the guy who invented the fax machine. Strange guy.

Did you come across any other interesting characters for the book?
Oh, yeah. A ton. There’s a writer now living in Phoenix who worked on a sketch show for a little-known Canadian cable station. The show was called Peter, Peter! It was about a group of characters who lived in a Toronto apartment house where there were no doors. Each week they had a different theme: one week it would be “sex,” the next week “drugs.” And each of the sketches would revolved around these themes. But the producer for the show had a son who wanted to get into show biz real bad and he insisted that this guy, this idiotic kid, play a character in at least a few sketches each week. The kid could never remember his lines and would mumble and fumble. One time, in a sketch about an armless Amish farmer, the kid threw up. It may be on Youtube.

Where did you write the book?
At home.

And where is that?
Poolesville, Maryland. But I also wrote some of it on a skiff that I own. I sailed from Maryland to the Bahamas and back.

Did you learn anything over the course of writing the book?
John Rymer, a writer for a little-seen movie called Hamburger University, which starred a young Ken Hipwell, told me something really interesting. When he was just starting out as a writer, he created an animated show called The Woofin’ Coughs. The show was terrible, but he ended up working with another comedy writer, who’s also now famous, Timothy Morrow. Tim later went on to create the web series Mr. Skattered Pants and wrote the amazingly funny film Tomatoes Ain’t a Fruit. Anyway, Tim told Ken that the most important thing to remember in show business is to never work with anyone taller than you are. Isn’t that strange? But I guess it worked for him.

I heard that you were nearly arrested recently.
I’d rather not talk about that, honestly.

What are your favorite comedies? Do you have any?
Wow. Um, I love so many. Have you seen Welcome to the ‘Hood on the Sci-Fi network? I love the premise of that show: that aliens have invaded a small town in America but they’re allergic to wheat and organic products.

This is a show? I never heard of it.
It’s great. It’s a really funny take on the whole “green” movement.

Any more?
A lot of great new TV shows. Um, Surviving My Dinner is great. The Glam’ Fam on the cooking channel is pretty hilarious. Hooter Church, God’s Little Stinkers, Axe Me No Questions: Lumberjack Court, and I really like Bob and His Raisin Babies.

As far as literature, I really like a new book by a young writer named Juliette Griffin. The book is called On the Grove. It’s about a family of talking rabbits who decide to hit the road and perform stand-up. They get booed off the stage at the Apollo. It’s very sad. But funny, too. And I really like the new novel by Rod Tinsley that takes place in 2015. The premise is that there are no more offices, so everyone just has to work outdoors, usually in a field or in a skateboarding park. Nothing gets done, but everyone has a nice tan. It’s a terrific story. It’s called None of This was True.

Thanks for your time.
Thank you.

Design a Wave is Tom from Cleckhuddersfax’s solo project, following a similar musical trajectory to Kindness but more experimental, like very early Human League or Cold Cave before they bit the bullet and just completely ripped off New Order (although I still love them). This isn’t the track off the split release, but something completely new that Tom sent me last week. The Groove Records release is available very soon, but for now you can pick up a CD-R from French label Angry Ballerina. There’s a track and a bizarre video of Design a Wave soundtracking a dance routine by some green-and-blue-faced munchkins below.

Design a Wave - “Actually You”