Alter Senator

We’re all better versions of ourselves on social media. Life is just one big adventure there, with blemish-free profile pics, posts about parties where only the coolest go and shapshots of exotic locations. The protagonist in Wayne Horse’s short film doesn’t need a smartphone to pimp up his life. He’s got Alter Senator, his favorite gin. He staggers through a life that is probably as static, dismal and boring as the scenes in the film suggest, but alcohol twists reality. In his world, he’s an astronaut and shop girls go to work naked. Horse is a multimedia artist, and sees his work as a form of ethnographic surrealism. He observes the everyday, injects it with a dose of absurdity and then magnifies it to grotesque proportions. His raw and subversively attractive style recalls the novels of Charles Bukowski and Hubert Selby, Jr. In any case, the drunken madness we see in is a good deal more poetic than all that bragging on social media.