The Exile Hour By cover art

The Exile Hour

By: theexilehour
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  • Summary

  • It’s 12:30 p.m. You wake up, and at 1:30 p.m. you roll out of bed and turn on the radio, then open your local newspaper to check the HELP WANTED adverts. During breakfast, you turn on the television to catch a few minutes of the 24-hour news shows. School shootings. Higher taxes. Immigrants being treated badly. The price of milk has risen considerably. You turn it off quickly, filled with a sense of dread after seeing the latest disappointments the human race has to offer you. Shortly thereafter, you take the bus to roam aimlessly around the megalopolis, collect your UBI check, and contemplate on how to find meaning in your sad excuse of a life. While riding, you decide to escape the routine by listening to THE EXILE HOUR on your iPhone 19. As you look out of the window at the sea of LCD billboards on the highways that you pass by, the voices of Caleb Jackson Dills and Evan Philip Lipson act as a safety blanket, lulling you into a TRUE sense of security. You hardly notice the dilapidated high-rises and superstructures you are zooming past as you are whisked away into the nightscape that is THE EXILE HOUR. Tonight’s guest has done something his mother probably is not too proud of, and you are finding yourself relating just a little too easily. In fact, you have more in common with this guy than every co-worker you have had over the span of your insignificant life. You excitedly nod along, enthralled at the places you are able to travel while remaining stationary. In fact, you are so captivated you miss your stop. Another hour added to your commute, but you do not mind in the slightest. Next stop: THE EXILE HOUR.
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Episodes
  • Dan Zukovic: The Culture is Going Down On Itself (Still)

    Dan Zukovic: The Culture is Going Down On Itself (Still)
    Jan 2 2024
    "The camera has unbound daemonic Western imagination. Cinema is sexual showing, a pagan flaunting. Plot and dialogue are obsolete word-baggage. Cinema, the most eye-intense of genres, has restored pagan antiquity's cultic exhibitionism. Spectacle is a pagan cult of the eye." —Camille Paglia

    Dan Zukovic (c. 19??) is a North American writer/director, actor, and musician who exists within a rarefied lineage of American actor/auteurs that take on a wide variety of film & television roles in order to fund their own uncompromising & visionary films; projects that fall outside the bounds of the conventional marketplace, typified by themes, elements, and/or subject matter that often call into question the motivations and machinations of said marketplace, as well as the culture at large.

    Much like the groundbreaking 20th century composer Edgard Varèse, Zukovic's own films are few in number, but stand apart as richly complex worlds unto themselves, often containing a shocking degree of prescience and cultural/psychological insight into the time periods from which they emerge and what's likely coming down the pike—time capsules beyond time. His films are characterized by a Hitchcock-like employment of fetishized visual symbols & imagery, mercilessly sardonic humor, and a devilish use of dialogue that borders on the Shakespearean.

    Zukovic himself emerged from the Vancouver punk scene of the late 1970s as a member of The Gargoyles. He wrote and directed three incendiary short films, Now Renting (1993), Conjurer of Monikers (1994), and Vertman (1994) in addition to several works for the stage, before releasing his debut feature The Last Big Thing (1996) which is probably the most explosively scathing and hilarious cinematic indictment of nascent hypermodernity, with its increasingly cathexis-like obsession with pop culture and what Zukovic's character Simon Geist describes in the film as the "LA fame need". The film is something of a gnostic millenarian followup to Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust. The movie tagline is: "The culture is going down on itself... go ahead, Scream!".

    Following a limited theatrical release, The Last Big Thing sporadically aired on the Showtime channel for a number of years, allowing the film to experience something approximating the phenomenon of a "cult" following, although it still remains something of an obscurity (as of this posting is still unavailable to stream or purchase on DVD). Bob Sagat and Norm Macdonald likely drew elements from the movie for their 1998 black comedy Dirty Work.

    As the 1990s independent cinema era came to an inexorable close and the technocratic internet age rose towards unprecedented prominence and power, Zukovic managed to release his second independent feature, Dark Arc in 2004. Zukovic playing one of the three leads—his character Viscount Laris is reminiscent of the eccentric recluse and dandyish aesthete Jean des Esseintes from Huysmans' novel Against Nature—becomes enmeshed in a "sicky eccentric" love triangle. Like des Esseintes, Laris attempts to escape his own time which he views as an aesthetic wasteland in which the [decadent] culture has become inundated and deluged by an inescapable and seemingly endless glut of mediated images, both ephemeral and meaningless in their consumerist design & intent.

    His form of escapism consists primarily of carrying around a personal "image horde" with him at all times—a carefully curated retinal museum containing only the most enduringly charged and powerful images collected over his lifetime, used to counteract the daily visual morass. Laris selects an image or series of images from his horde, sometimes framing certain aspects of them, and then gazes upon them with full intensity for extended periods (of
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    1 hr and 33 mins
  • Jack Wright: Shaky Ground

    Jack Wright: Shaky Ground
    Oct 28 2023
    "In the rarefied, underground world of experimental free improvisation, saxophonist Jack Wright is king." -Washington Post   "The fight that seems so radical and virtuous meshes perfectly with the maintenance of the social order." - Jack Wright   “Jack Wright is, and will always be, my scout leader.” - Dennis J. Palmer 

    Described forty years ago as an "undergrounder by design," Jack Wright is a veteran saxophone improviser based mainly in Philadelphia. In 1979, after an academic career teaching at Temple University (European History) and activist politics, he returned to the instrument of his youth. Almost immediately he discovered free improvisation, virtually unknown at the time and still obscure. He is one of the few who have played this exclusively since then, one of the originals of the 80s era. He plays mostly on tour through the US and Europe in search of interesting partners and playing situations. Now at 80 he is still the "Johnny Appleseed of Free Improvisation," as the late guitarist Davey Williams dubbed him back in that earlier era, continuing to inspire musicians, playing and organizing sessions and gigs with visiting and resident players old and new. His Spring Garden Music House has been around since 1977, for the past sixteen years housing only improvisers and providing space for private playing sessions.

    He has avoided the standard career aimed at visibility and prestige, seeing it as a hindrance to musical growth. The partners he's preferred over the years have also been mostly unknown to the music press, and too numerous to list here. His current focus is sound-oriented, mostly associated with the underground known as noise music. His main partners the past several years have been Zach Darrup, guitar,Ben Bennett, percussion, Evan Lipson, double bass, and Ron Stabinsky. keyboards, the personnel of Wrest, 
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    1 hr and 55 mins
  • GENESIS AND BEYOND: The Boyd Rice Christmas/Hanukkah Extravaganza

    GENESIS AND BEYOND: The Boyd Rice Christmas/Hanukkah Extravaganza
    Dec 26 2022

    GENESIS AND BEYOND: The Boyd Rice Christmas/Hanukkah Extravaganza

     

    “Boyd Rice is a black pimp.” —Charles Manson

     

    “Boyd Rice was my mentor." —Marilyn Manson

     

    “Boyd is an iconoclast!” —Anton LaVey, Church of Satan

     

    “Boyd Rice could be the next John F. Kennedy or Jesus Christ.” —Kim Fowley

     

    “(Boyd Rice) is a bad influence.” —Der Spiegel

     

    Referred to by some as “The most dangerous man alive”, Boyd Rice (c. 1956) is a pioneering American artist, occultist, prankster, mystic, social critic, archivist, and provocateur whose impact & influence has penetrated nearly every level of global underground culture; a notably brazen and polarizing figure who has courted endless controversy worldwide over a span of more than four decades. Rice initially came to prominence in the 1970s as one of the founders of the “Industrial Music” genre and as one of the first artists signed to Mute Records. He quickly gained a reputation for starkly ritualistic live performances that were regarded as being the most abrasive, minimalistic, dangerous, and blisteringly high volume concerts ever staged. As early as 1980, he was already being hailed as “The Godfather of Noise”.   Since then, Rice—a high school dropout raised in a Southern California trailer park—extended his creative pursuits to innumerable fields including visual art, film, literature, photography, acting, interior decoration/design, and culinary arts (taking first prize in the 2012 Denver County Fair Jello molding competition) among other things; something of a Renaissance Man for our technocratic age of decadence and decline.    In his own words: “My life is a testament to the idea that you can achieve whatever the hell you want if you possess a modicum of creativity, and a certain amount of naivete concerning what is and isn’t possible in this world. I’ve had one man shows of my paintings in New York, but I’m not a painter. I’ve authored several books, but I’m not a writer. I’ve made a living as a recording artist for the last 30 years, but I can’t read a note of music or play an instrument. I’ve somehow managed to make a career out of doing a great number of things I’m in no way qualified to do.”   In the 1980s, through his collaborations with Re/Search Publications, Rice further established his position in the underground with recountings of his uproarious pranks and the promotion of “incredibly strange” cult films and “industrial” culture. Rice’s influence on the subculture was further extended through his vanguard exhibition of found photographs and readymade thrift store art, as well as his zealous endorsements and curation of outsider music, totalitarian & military aesthetics, tiki culture (even designing a now defunct tiki bar in Denver, Colorado eponymously named Tiki Boyd’s), and bygone pop culture in general (he’s been an avid collector, outspoken enthusiast, and longtime archivist of myriad forgotten mid-century oddities & treasures).  
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    2 hrs and 3 mins
Art
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