13 Gibson, Brian. Vue Weekly, “What childhood films are these?”, film review, Issue #634:Jingle Bell Rock!, December 11, 2007. Accessed: July 29, 2013. http://www.vueweekly. com/film/story/what_childhood_ films_are_these/ 14 Email to the author, April 23rd 2013.
responds with equal patience and suppressed rage that he is quitting the business to open a balloon delivery service, which he will name, “Here are your fucking balloons.” If the business works, he plans to open a second store, etc. Tehrani’s work presents Pernice’s balloon delivery service as a visualization of potlatch, an economic system used by the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast of Canada and United States. A potlatch ceremony could take any number of forms, but one of the most extreme was the aggressive destruction of goods to prove one’s wealth and power to a rival. Tehrani was interested in the reference, in part, because Potlatch was also the title of the Lettrist International magazine from 1954 to 1957. He writes, “The typographical displacement of the word HERE in the right panel is intended to recall the competitive element in the Potlatch economy, shortly put the point of asserting dominance by giving away an object of greater value than the one(s) received.” 14 The link, for Tehrani, is the aggression involved in meaningless consumption. There is another logic here as well: balloons are entirely useless. To give someone a balloon is a useless gesture. Yet despite its uselessness, giving people balloons is also lucrative in capitalist society. A person can make money delivering balloons, even if they can’t make money making music. Some small part of this value might be their symbolism, exemplified by the Red Balloon, of insouciance in the face of the Spectacle. When rage fails, when revolution fails, we are left with balloons as the anti-emblem. I interpret this pair of drawings by Tehrani as a comment of the state of revolutionary desire today. We are all too aware of how seamlessly capitalism absorbed both May 1968 and the raging energy of punk, Madchester and acid house that was its echo ten and twenty years later. The problem of revolution today is how to do something with the anger and the desire that is not useless, that cannot be reduced to the fantasy of transformation depicted in the Red Balloon. Tehrani doesn’t attempt an answer to this dilemma, but he does persistently point out the ways in which pictures both succeed and fail to represent the radical impulse.
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