Paul Linklater, “Sleepwalker” (2008)

Initially it’s the falsetto, the desolate choir of his voice singing to all the girls in hospital gowns walking the shoulder of the highway. And then it is the utter homemade-ness of the thing. Too often, the Internet is some modern creep who does nothing but advertise for dog food and bikinis turning whatever tenuous insularity you have into strobe lights and billboards. The modern creep wears a turquoise suit and he steals you just as you are getting to the real or realer thing.

By contrast, “Sleepwalker” makes me feel I am alone in a basement with my best friend in grade eight while he allows me into his private weirdness. He asks me to hold the camera while deciding to have a blue balloon for a face. And he consults with me about his crude psychedelia of graphics. And then the cat walks through the frame. And then we joke about his hat for rice farming while he makes more coffee because we want to feel high all of the time even if this means glue, markers, crushes and nutmeg.

I love the total absence of hipness. And at the end, the bright pastels are surely some topographical map of a volcano or an offer of oblivion. Then for a moment we get a glimpse of our creator before the blue balloon flies up again and takes his face like a decision made by a primitive god.

- Claudia Dey

Teri’s videos have disappeared from the web! Copyright issues apparently. Still, we hope to restore this video soon! Meantime, Teri’s site is here.

Teri gets out of the passenger side of an SUV parked in a Handicapped spot wearing a long black leather coat and nine inch platform boots. Her face has the pallor of the motionless. Her hair is the yellow of candy and her makeup is the makeup she put on when she was a teenager stranded in her pink bedroom with nothing but her face. 

What is so curious about this video is when Teri lights a cigarette, grips her heel above her head and preens like a girl with a single, provocative trick, and, then with limp defiance, apologizes to those fetishists who will not appreciate her choice of boot and walks away from the truck toward the sunset, there are no other parkers in the enormous parking lot. The world Teri walks into is empty. There are some trees and some mountains in the distance, but no people. I am the scenery, Teri is saying, I am the scenery. 

The only other person in the whole world aside from Teri is the man who holds the camera. This makes me think: Harmony Korine’s version of Adam and Eve. We never see the man. He attempts debonairness. He excuses his dirty truck tires and is taken by Teri’s final act: a striptease which is brief, distracted and, she promises with the tiredness of the long-initiated, only a beginning.

- Claudia Dey