Mercedes, Armandine, Marie, Melanie, Victoria, Julie having fun in the swimming pool – September 2009

I shot this video at Jello Biafra’s 50th birthday bash at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, June 17, 2008. As some of you might know, Jello Biafra’s (Dead Kennedys) punk rock has always been quite loud (to say the least) — and since I forgot to bring “ear-plugs” for the camera, the original sound on the video got COMPLETELY distorted. Hence, I decided to edit a new sound track for it with music by Franz Liszt (his virtuosic piano piece “La Campanella”). My initial plan was to bring in my big super-duper camera to shoot this event, but as you can see the mosh-pit was a bit too “lively” to support anything fragile and of monetary value. Instead I opted to shoot some snippets with my dinky el crappo camera. So now, after a few edits & sync-ups to the new sound track, the entire thing ended up almost as an absurd Chaplin/Keaton parody… FYI — Newt Gingrich and Jello Biafra share birthdays (mentioned in his little political speech in the middle of the video), and still to this day also Biafra is very much into politics (Green Party) and spoken-word performances. You can also see how articulate he was already at 22 in this rare British interview: www.youtube.com — peer .