Cameron Jamie

by Gary Indiana (Contributor)

Cameron Jamie's calling is tracking down extreme social phenomena and presenting them in short documentary films. His best known film, BB , documents "backyard wrestling" among working-class kids in his native San Fernando Valley. In Spook Houses , he explores a suburban Chicago community that takes a little too much pleasure in the macabre at Halloween, transforming front lawns into cemeteries and kitchens into mausoleums. And in Kranky Claus, a film about Krampus rituals in Austria, he accompanies those legendary demons on their nightmarish pre-Christmas tour, thrashing frightened children. As Jamie says of his subjects and as he proves to his audiences, "The creepiest things in the world are always the things that are considered to be the most OEormal.'"

200 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2006

About the author

Gary Hoisington, known as Gary Indiana, was an American writer, actor, artist, and cultural critic. He served as the art critic for the Village Voice weekly newspaper from 1985 to 1988. Indiana is best known for his classic American true-crime trilogy, Resentment, Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story, and Depraved Indifference, chronicling the less permanent state of "depraved indifference" that characterized American life at the millennium's end. In the introduction to the recently re-published edition of Three Month Fever, critic Christopher Glazek has coined the phrase 'deflationary realism' to describe Indiana's writing, in contrast to the magical realism or hysterical realism of other contemporary writing.

Reviews

[Erin Tuzuner · Rating 4 out of 5]

So fun.