hey triplesix,
mike palmieri here, director of the strokes "juicebox" video. i'm writing to let you know how amazing and hilarious i think your mashup of my video with "night of the living dead" is. not only have you created something of your own in response to something you didn't like, you've brought new life to a horribly compromised and censored video in an incredibly apt way. i don't think you even realize what you've done here, so i'll try and explain. you're an artist in the way that you respond to other people's work by making your own, so you deserve the whole story!

this video has been about censorship from the moment i proposed the idea. i find it incredibly interesting that you ended up censoring what you saw in response to it because you smelled a rat -- you didn't like it, and for good reason. you were looking at a leaked, unfinished rough cut of a video attempting to address about 40 cuts mtv had asked us to make so they'd even air the video. in short you were reacting to a piece of work that had been severely censored in its own right.

the unfortunate problem mtv had with censoring the video is that there was nothing explicit in the video to take out to begin with. they were trying to censor an idea, which is really hard to do. the video is deliberately unsettling. to me it's about the end of the line of american behaviour - bad fart jokes, pornography, voyeurism, old women and their fucked up intimate relations with pets because human beings just don't cut the mustard, technology driving us away from one another by bringing us closer to one another in other more obscene ways, etc.  but is there really any actual sexual content in this video? not really. christina aguilera shakes her booty with a gaffer-taped thong two inches from the camera for three minutes and that's ok, but we can't show a blurred out image of women wearing bikinis in a magazine in a wide shot for half a second, at least according to mtv, because it's disgraceful to women. what does this actually mean? is mtv up in arms about lesbians on a rooftop, or are they disturbed by how the lesbians on the rooftop are presented - as material for a man to jerk off to in the dark? by showing the end result of the pornographic chain maybe i've done something truly disturbing. i've shown what people do when they go home at night and sit in front of their computers. now that's a censorable offense! 

what mtv eventually forced me to take out caused the video's narrative through-line to fall apart. it got so bad, in fact, that i took my name off the video, the first time i've ever had to do something like that. they drove what i was saying into the proverbial closet, as it were. and in doing so, they created something much more satisfying: a participatory, interactive music video art installation directed by no one, and everyone, on the internet. well, at least you're participating!

the censorship on this video has so many layers to it it's staggering. it began before we even started filming it, fueled by a statement made by julian in all good humor about the possibility of "full frontal nudity" being in their next video and that "mtv will never air it". that comment created a buzz storm on the internet and started the narrowing-down process of what the video was going to be allowed to be in everyone's heads. that is to say, people began to expect something that i never intended to deliver, a XXX video in a compartmentalized way that they were used to getting. but people are barfing in this video. scumbags with DV cameras are filming cheesy hookers on a roof. a woman is driven to orgasm by her dog through a ritual of scrubbing a floor with champagne so he'll finally bark at her. gay men are hooking up in bathrooms and they don't even know or care what the other person looks like. that's not sexy, it's fucked up and disturbing. for a reason! i'm holding up a mirror to the parts of our culture that are gross and tasteless. that's why the video makes you want to take a shower when you're done watching it. it's intended to have that effect.

when the video finally surfaces, people are so unsettled by it that everyone wants to censor it. RCA wants to censor the first version because they think it's too violent and won't even show it to the band. MTV wants to censor an approved version because it's so unsettling. i suggest using censors as a way of getting around the problem like "scene deleted".  the band doesn't want to use censors on the censored version as it censors their own air time. to be fair, the band didn't want to use censors for another reason: they were tired of going up against mtv and losing the battle. they've been doing that for five years. fair enough, we all reasoned, at least we have our director's cut. 

then the video leaks and you come into the equation.

you are so flummoxed by the shitty censored version of the video that leaked that you censor the censored version by using free editing software downloaded off the very internet that started the controversy to begin with and create a new version of the video. and your version of the video is genius to me for an even more specific reason: you inserted media from a film whose core theme is about how america has gone to the zombies. why, that's what i was trying to say all along! i applaud you! i want to kiss you! i want to tear off your clothes and have dirty sex with you in a gay bathroom stall without a condom and film it! you somehow absorbed my point without realizing it, i think. and i don't know how many people will get my point in the end because they don't allow themselves the space to think about what i'm really saying. plus the video everyone saw off the bat was censored already. mtv may be a place for spoonfed entertainment, but i don't make spoonfed videos. i ask questions that are hopefully challenging. and you're the only one who has risen to the occasion so far because you've asked your own questions in response. "hey guys, i don't like this. here's a version i did... what do you think?"

so much has happened since my delivery of the director's cut to the band - who fought tooth and nail for me to have it, btw -  that i've actually altered my own cut in an attempt to keep up with the entire experience. i've created a "censored director's cut" for my own site and reel. it's the most artistically truthful representation of an entire process which has been so totally focused on censorship to begin with. plus having another version (i think there's like 10 now) is like figuring out a puzzle inside of a maze while being stuck inside of a looking glass. you saw the director's cut? oh... but you didn't see the real director's cut, the one with the censors on it. no, not that one, but that one... and you should have seen what the director left out! it's scandalous! what a wonderfully fitting, enigmatic end to an awfully long process of delivering a creatively and sexually neutered video: the director's vision is censored, and in being censored he ends up saying more than he ever could have with the video in any way shape or form, by censoring his own final product... with help from you!

the end has no end, indeed.

rawK!
mike p.