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A TASTE OF TASTE WITH...

Sam Rolfes

Artists Devoted to The Bit, Mind Game (2004), The Best Chicken Wrap on Earth, and more.

July 19, 2023

Sam Rolfes
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Sam Rolfes is a New York-based virtual performer, musician, director, animator, and DJ known as “DJ Fuck.” He and his brother Andy make up Team Rolfes, a boundary-pushing digital performance and image studio specializing in figurative animation, VR, and mixed-reality collage. My mind is blown every time I see a Rolfes creation, so it’s no surprise that they’ve worked with legends such as Lady Gaga, Danny Elfman, and Metallica, brands like Nike and Adult Swim, and even our friends the Frost Children. Lucky for us, Sam is here to tell us what he’s been into.

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Artists Devoted to The Bit
There’s a kind of artist I revere who is so deeply committed to expressing the singular nature of their work that it becomes almost self-destructive. For me, Wesley Kimler and Sharkula come to mind – I think of them almost every day. Kimler, in addition to being my mentor for over a decade, is a painter infamous for his cavernous warehouse studios and the theatrical ragers periodically thrown inside, alongside pet foxes and parrots, massive contorted paintings of figures blasted into abstract glowing kites and seascapes, and for publicly calling out the (shake your fist with me) corruption and nepotism of the Chicago art world. Sharkula, (aka Caviar Brian, Thigamahjigee, Sherlock Homeboy, Dirty Gilligan, among others), is a goofball genius rapper who is recognizable to anyone that frequents Chicago’s Blue Line for selling CDs of his over 40 different albums and mixtapes, named things like Martin Luther King Whopper With Cheese, and delivered wrapped in Xeroxed paper with his tags and scribbles all over them.Both of them are devoted, in the religious sense, to their work in a way that I find deeply inspiring, while being a foil to every capitulation that I give into daily.
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A Swim in a Pond in The Rain
I already adore Saunders’ short stories, but his recent book that delicately outlines the mechanics and flow-states of both storytelling and story-reading often leaves me in a state of deep, sublime appreciation of life itself – melodramatic, I know, but I’m serious. It’s one of those books where I’ve basically transcribed the entire thing into my notes because every page is such a crystal clear revelation.
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The Best Chicken Wrap on Earth
Chicken wraps consume an inordinate percentage of my diet. I’ve probably eaten upwards of 4-5,000 chicken wraps in my lifetime, from countries all over the world, and as I’ve informed concerned friends and family, I have no plans to slow down. Down from our studio at Zerospace in Gowanus NYC is a small shop called Pūrbird, and their thigh wrap is easily the best chicken wrap I’ve had in my life. It’s healthy enough to be a daily meal, a dependable (albeit expensive) standby in anyone’s chicken arsenal, but the resulting ennui from having repeatedly had the best wrap on earth would probably affect your mental health at some point, so I only eat it occasionally. There are other things on the menu, and I’m sure they’re really good, but I haven’t had the chance to look at their descriptions yet.
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Media Pass for Flights
The idea of being able to fly with like 25 huge oversized bags at ~$50/bag is so wild to me. I was clued into this by a lighting designer for a number of big music acts, and while I haven’t tried it personally yet, there are enough Reddit posts about it for me to feel confident. It would be absolutely clutch if you’re touring or traveling with a lot of heavy gear. Basically you just mock up a badge in Word or MS Paint or whatever that says Media, (it’s remarkable how truly shitty it can look from what I hear), laminate it, and then go directly to the ticket counter and say you need media rates for luggage. I also just love that this kind of esoteric industry trick still exists.
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The Custom Pelican Case Foam Cutting Site
Idk if this is latent mental runoff from playing as Gig Economy Man in Death Stranding during lockdown, but top billing for my current fixations goes to this crazy site that Pelican has for designing custom foam for their equipment cases. You can upload photos of your gear and it’ll outline and place the pieces in whatever configuration you want, to be cut to size for your case. It’s like an RPG game inventory but IRL, and for our touring stage show we’ve designed a couple different foam loadouts that we can swap into our flight cases (depending on what gear the show requires)…I’m grinning while typing this, I just love this shit so much lol.
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Mind Game (2004)
Masaaki Yuasa is a nearly unparalleled stylistic storyteller whose work you can spot from a mile away, and Mind Game was an early masterpiece of his that I return to every year – there’s really nothing else like it that I’m aware of. Whereas other Yuasa projects explore issues like having sex with monsters to jazz music (Kemonozume), selling your memories to upper-class space-Frenchmen (Kaiba), or how delightful it is to be drunk in the summer (The Night is Short, Walk on Girl), Mind Game is a crazy beautiful smash-up of mediums that follows 20-yr old incel and artist Nishi as he tries to take ownership over his own life.

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