BlackBook Interview by John Ortved, FUCK YOU x FUCK ME

Nocturnal Confessions: We’re Not in Max’s Kansas City Anymore
By John Ortved February 15, 2010
We all have that story. Mine involves our family’s cleaning lady, descending from my parent’s bedroom, frozen mid-stairwell, mouth agape—her face caught in the tableau of shock, disgust, and curiosity that can only be achieved by an older person, usually a parental figure, surprised by a masturbating teenager.
The moment remains terrifying and humiliating because it is a public exposure of the most private few seconds of our lives. Even, or especially, as we age the idea that someone other than our partner might see us at that tiny moment of vulnerability remains too terrible to contemplate. It’s one thing for your roommates to hear you shagging—borders on entertainment—but getting caught in the act is another thing altogether. And yet photographer and director Casey RAnderson, and designer Seasick Mama are trying to make hay out of the incongruity of private sex and public exposure with a project called “Fuck You, Fuck Me,” wherein the two have produced a series of pillows, shirts and cards emblazoned with images of their fucking subjects, and vice versa.
At the casting call, “I would sit people down and ask them, ‘Do you know what you’re here for?’ and they’d say, ‘Kind of…’” says RAnderson, who would then ask his subjects to lie back, and simulate sex. “You can be happy, or you can be pissed off because your man just came all over your stomach and you didn’t get yours,” he would tell them. “And they were calm and cool about it; they opened up.”
But why not actually shoot people during the act? Andy Warhol broke that barrier more than 40 years ago with his photographs and films. Why not remove the filter? “That would be a more private thing. I’m fine if there’s 20 people in the room and I’m shooting someone having an orgasm, or I’m bringing them to an orgasm, because I definitely could bring women to having an orgasm without touching them, just talking to them as they touched themselves.”
Amazing. Like a vagina whisperer. “I’m a very sensitive person and able to respond to people and see how far I can push them.”
RAnderson’s source of confidence is anyone’s guess, but not hurting is the past 6 years spent in LA assisting the legendary Tony Kaye, the controversial director of American History X, Soul Asylum’s “Runaway Train” video, and countless commercials (Kaye is also famous for suing New Line for $275 million for not allowing him to be credited as “Humpty Dumpty” in the credits of American History X, and spent over $100,000 of his own money taking ads out in the trades to denounce Edward Norton and the film’s producers). Another source might be the fact that the other half of this loving endeavor, Seasick Mama, is also his girlfriend.
“We’re a team. We’re a couple. That’s my woman. I owe everything to her. She owes everything to me.” The pair cavorted and mixed easily with the crowd at the exhibit opening (at Inven.tory), with shoppers and navel-gazers appraising their work, stopping at each image, seemingly without shock, any awkwardness at all. Unsurprising to RAnderson, because, after all, “It’s just sex.”