Security Anthem

Security Anthem’s requisite components came together relatively slowly. I’d known for years that I wanted to make something out of the Oto speakers’ most sinister, suggestive sentences. I’d taught myself to program music on a Game Boy using a cartridge I’d bought from a Swedish programmer, and I composed a sequence of ominous music that seemed well-matched to the speakers. I’d recorded John Ashcroft singing his self-penned song “Let the Eagle Soar” through a media player window, and I knew that it somehow belonged with the speakers and the 8-bit music. I remember feeling frustrated at a lack of forward momentum in an early, more Dadaist edit, so I typed all of the speakers’ sentences into a text file and re-arranged them until they were as close to a linear narrative poem as I could get them. It read as the kind of poem a deranged teacher might write for and read to a kindergarten class. The period of obsessive final editing and tweaking happened early in the winter of 2002-03, as Bush/Cheney and company laid out their plans for more war, as if the world were their classroom of oblivious toddlers. Security Anthem premiered at KJ Mohr’s Discount Cinema series in late January 2003, along with an early cut of Laurie Jo Reynolds’ Space Ghost. Ben Russell was at the screening and insisted that I add a short pause between the speakers and the Ashcroft cameo. I complied and saw that he was right and knew that the piece was done. It went on to have a wider reach and a longer and more robust screening life than anything else on this compilation by far.  

“A ritual recitation of the mundane for uncertain times.”

— New York Video Festival

“Kent Lambert's chilling Security Anthem is an exercise in post-September 11^th dementia in which banal lines delivered by talking heads ("The onions made him cry") become increasingly sinister, leading to a surprise ending featuring John Ashcroft.”

— Fred Camper, Chicago Reader, August 2003

“A ‘Red States Agonistes’ in which a chorus of concerned faces from the heartland narrate a tragedy of found poetry. Dirty potatoes, sharp knives, an only son, and too-fast driving augur certain catastrophe that not even the intervention of deus ex machina John Ashcroft can divert or relieve.”

— Spencer Parsons, Cinematexas, September 2003

This video is part of the Oto Trilogy and is also avaliable on Kent Lambert Videoworks: Volume 1