Miranda July

A few years back, I had a job in Santa Monica. The downside of this was that my commute took over an hour each way. The upside was that, as I snaked through Hollywood (no slower than going the freeways, and more interesting) my radio could pick up KXLU, the student radio station out of Loyola-Marymount College. One day, I heard this amazing track, a strange monologue that told some kind of paranoid scifi story over a background of annoying electronic sounds. It seriously freaked me out. When I got into the office, I immediately called the radio station and asked the DJ what it was. She told me the artist was Miranda July, and the track was called The Birnet-Simon Test (which, it turned out, was actually the name of the CD--the track was called "Medical Wonder").

Miranda July resurfaced this year, as the director/writer/star of Me and You and Everyone We Know, which won the "Special Jury Prize for Originality of Vision" at Sundance, which seems about right. It's a unique film. I'm not sure what other way to describe it. It's not weird in a David Lynch way, but it's unlike any other film I've ever seen. It's mostly about alienated people trying to connect in the modern world, but it also has some strange and disturbing things to say about the sexualization of children (whether that is it's intention or not). As weird as some of the things that people say and do in this movie are, they feel very real, and I'm positive that many of them must be taken from real life. It's the kind of stuff you just couldn't make up.

Miranda July - Medical Wonder (mp3)
From The Binet-Simon Test on Kill Rock Stars

You and Me and Everyone We Know