An afternoon at the Chicago International Movies & Music Festival

Music and movies: two of my favorite things, together.  We took in four films at CIMMFest on April 14.  It made for a stimulating birthday afternoon of filmgoing at the Logan Theater with Karolyn.

"The Coconut" (Nimisha Mukerji, 2011)

This 10-minute short opens on a home movie: it's 1991, and an exuberant little girl boogies while her delighted musician dad plays guitar and sings for her.  Flash forward 20 years and Shani Banerjee is a struggling young singer following her dream but torn by thoughts of pleasing her disapproving grandparents, who came to the US from India in the early 60s.  She's torn between cultures as well.  We see her caring for her wheelchair-bound mother, who has MS.  You get a lot of life, a lot of hopes and dreams, in just these few minutes.  It's a reminder of how powerful "reality" could be, had it not been so completely degraded.  Ms. Banerjee was at the screening. 

"Louder Than Love: The Grande Ballroom Story" (Troy D’Annunzio, 2012)

The Grande Ballroom was ground zero for Detroit's very particular grassroots take on rock & roll and radical politics in the late 60s and early 70s, its own version of communal high energy, which I got a feel for from real-time reports in my cherished old back issues of Creem.  As a moment that was pretty much gone by the time I was born, the scene documented in this film lives for me more in my imagination than anywhere else.  I first heard the MC5's "Kick Out the Jams" in 1987 on an alternative rock radio show.  I can remember my friend and me air-banding to it: we thought it was a new release.  In that way, Detroit in the 60s lives for me not as nostalgia but as moment that every rock & roll fan shares: that moment when we glimpsed the transcendence that would forever be our benchmark for the life force.  

Born in 1971, I was raised in the bucolic suburbs of Athens, Ohio, in a time and place about as far from rough, working-class Detroit in the terminal years of Vietnam and civil rights as possible (as the film opens, the city is in flames).  Still, my mom is from Detroit.  No, she wasn't hanging out at the Grande: in her late 20s by then, she was a nurse in Vietnam, but the footage of ordinary people on the street gave me a sense of her hometown.  

In general, though, this film is far too much telling and far too little showing.  Too many interviews, shot in an unimaginative talking-head style (though occasionally projecting them on the proscenium arch of today's Grande--abandoned and in ruins--is a nice touch), not enough actual footage.  And while they talk to some of the right people (John Sinclair, Wayne Kramer), I would even quarrel with some of the talking heads.  It's all very well to talk to Harvey Ovshinsky from the Fifth Estate, but why not talk to someone from Creem?  Dave Marsh would've been a better interview than some of those featured here.  Plus, the wall-to-wall Detroit high-energy music is used mainly as background.  Still, there are some great stills--I love the colorful bass-drum art of the times, seen here on the kits of Keith Moon and Nick Mason--and it's fascinating to see how bands that would go on to become distant stadium stars in the 70s (Pink Floyd, the Who) were as accesible as the neighborhood bands when they played the Grande.  In short, this is worth seeing if you're interested in this era, and the glimpses it does give of the Grande experience are exhilarating enough to have me grinning from ear to ear, but I was hoping for more of a window into this world.  Instead, I'm still awaiting that (eternally rumored) MC5 documentary.   

"Spend It All" (Les Blank, 1971) and "Dry Wood" (Les Blank, 1973)

Fishing, horse racing, zydeco, dancing, children, food and drink: here's Les Blank's record of life in rural Louisiana in the early 70s, which is to say these films are celebrations of music and food.  "Spend It All" is about the white community (the Cajuns), "Dry Wood" about the black (the Creoles).  

The Cajuns lived pretty much isolated from mainstream America for most of American history.  At the outset of "Spend It All," titles tell us they welcomed "runaway slaves and pirates".  Crawfish, crab, chunky trout: fishermen pull it all out of the bayou.  We go to picnics where the men play zydeco and people dance.  Butchering a hog is a gory communal event where they use "everything but the squeal". 

"Dry Wood" opens on the colorful, surreal costumes of Mardi Gras.  There's a great scene at a dance with a joyous zydeco band: the singer wears a shiny gold vest, little boys huddle from an impassive little girl with all the cooty-fearing they can muster.  The sausage-making scene is unforgettable.  It's fascinating to see how the white and black communities share so much culture.  And yet, as a portrait of a community under the yoke of racism, there is a dark undertone to "Dry Wood" that I did not feel in "Spend It All".   

I was struck by Blank's eye: he often shoots so we can see the whole person in the frame, but then he can zoom in and capture a telling detail: a foot tapping, something in the natural landscape like white blooms high in a tree.  These films remind us of one of the essential qualities of film: its ability to record reality.  They're full of great music.  As a look at the rhythms of community life, you could put them on the shelf next to "The Tree of the Wooden Clogs".       

Les Blank himself, one of our great documentarians, was in the house for a Q&A after the films.  The man who once shot Werner Herzog eating his own shoe, in person.

*  *  *

Watching these four films back to back, it made me thing about what a great and strange country this is, to be able to encompass it all.  America as battlefield.  America as home.

LOUDER THAN LOVE-The Grande Ballroom Story from Tony D'Annunzio on Vimeo.

An electric evening with Wild Flag

If there was one thought that kept running through my mind at the Wild Flag concert on Thursday night at the Metro, it was this: this is the life force.  I'd been feeling a bit beat going into the evening, if not quite ready to hang up my rock & roll shoes for the night at least feeling like maybe propping them up on something.  By the time the show was over I was exhilarated, carried out of the hall on a high, aching feet forgotten.  My overwhelming feeling was, now that keeps you young.   

It took them a little while to get warmed up.  I could actually feel the moment they locked in, when Carrie Brownstein and Mary Timony faced off in a guitar duel that crested and broke in a massive, glorious explosion of noise.  It is in moments like this that live music becomes an almost physical thing.  

At times Brownstein and Timony just broke out beaming, with smiles that proclaimed, "This is exactly what I wanted to do with my life".  Those looks carried even more meaning because, by their own testimony, there were years when they weren't sure whether playing rock & roll was even the way their lives were going to go.

What's great about the band, vets all, is how they embody the amateurish joy of garage-y rock & roll whilst being such hot players.   It's a deeply satisfying textural contrast, that guitar crunch mixed with a pop sensibility and what my friend Eileen called the "girly-girl" harmonies of drummer Janet Weiss and keys player Rebecca Cole.  "Glass Tambourine" blew me away, becoming live a chance for the band to stretch out and cut loose, twin guitars attacking, a suite of tension and release, dirty feedback and clean precision.  "Racehorse" flattened me.  

Carrie Brownstein is a rock & roll hero, master of every rock & roll move.  Wearing a red blouse over a black bra, she wielded her axe like Excalibur, sending out waves of power chords.  She kicked, she windmilled, she got off on the sensual waves of sound.  During one song she eyed the middle distance with a glint I could see even from back in the hall, like a woman facing down her worst fears...or spotting her main chance.  Mary Timony's guitar was precision amidst the hurricane.  Rebecca Cole's keys could scorch the earth, color the music psychedelic or be church-organ grand.  As for Janet Weiss, we've long known she's one of the most galvanic drummers out there today, and as a former drummer myself it was a treat for me to watch her pound out those mighty tom rolls.    

They closed with a series of cover.  As the opening chords of Television's "See No Evil" rang out I remembered how much I loved "Marquee Moon" during the years I was first falling in love with music.  They ended the night with Carrie hanging off the mic stand like Iggy Pop, belting out a Fugazi cover.  (I'm indebted to my friend Jesse, who I ran into on the way out, for placing that one for me: I knew I'd heard the tune before.)

When they kicked into the sheer fun of the Ramones' version of "Do You Wanna Dance?", a roomful of rock & roll hearts pogoed up and down, propelled by the pulse of the four women on stage whose every move sent out a quite basic yet life-enhancing message: I love rock & roll. 

Springsteen's SXSW speech and me

By turns funny and thoughtful, bawdy and shot through with the sex and rebellion of adolescent awakening, Bruce Springsteen's keynote address at South by Southwest is many things.  (Not that I was there: I listened to it via the link above).  It's advice.  It's an education.  It is a rock 'n' roll disciple painting poetic, electric thumbnail portraits of his heroes and what they showed him: the level of intensity that's possible, the sense that there is another way to live...a way out.  It is also about how the meaning and power of music still stand when you're no longer an adolescent.  It kept bringing me back to a point in my life when I was on my own search for identity, and Bruce became my compass.  (I guess I'm gonna call him "Bruce" in this, if that's alright with you).

"Music is my savior/I was named by rock & roll/I was maimed by rock & roll/I was tamed by rock & roll/I got my name from rock & roll".  That's a line from Wilco, and that's the eternal story Bruce was telling in his speech.  And though the reference points would be different for me--and though my times were far more comfortable and sheltered than Bruce's--I felt like he was telling my story.  Born in 1971, I found the life-force in my adolescence in the post-punk "alternative" cats: R.E.M., the Replacements, the Talking Heads, the Violent Femmes, and on and on.    

It was only later that my story and Bruce's art converged.  I was a rather adrift college kid at the end of the 80s when I grabbed Bruce's music like a life preserver.  In the years from 18 to 21--the years I became an adult--he started speaking to me deeply, whereas I hadn't been able to relate to him at all as a kid.  His speech at SXSW thus recalled for me many nights of very personal, private listening, blasting bootlegs through headphones all night long while writing papers or cramming for exams.  These were the same years that I got deeply into film, and Bruce's music was so cinematic: it offered a persona, a stance, just like the movies I'd see trying to "learn how to walk like the heroes we thought we had to be."  The movies I was discovering and Bruce's music seemed to echo across each other's skies: Scorsese's "Mean Streets" and Bruce's "Jungleland" intertwined in the landscape of my imagination. 

This is a guy who started out where many of the young musicians at SXSW are now, playing in bars, and who went out and proved it night after night after night--all night, every night.  But if the unspoken story of the speech was that of a young fan listening to the titans who grew up to take his place as one of them, Bruce crucially found that he could never be the Center of It All in the 70s and 80s, the way Elvis or the Beatles had been before.  For the animating spark of his speech he looked to the famous concluding paragraph of Lester Bangs's "Where Were You When Elvis Died?", words that always moved me tremendously:

"If love truly is going out of fashion forever, which I do not believe, then along with our nurtured indifference to each other will be an even more contemptuous indifference to each others' objects of reverence. I thought it was Iggy Stooge, you thought it was Joni Mitchell or whoever else seemed to speak for your own private, entirely circumscribed situation's many pains and few ecstasies. We will continue to fragment in this manner, because solipsism holds all the cards at present; it is a king whose domain engulfs even Elvis's. But I can guarantee you one thing: we will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis. So I won't bother saying good-bye to his corpse. I will say good-bye to you."

In his speech, Bruce showed how right Lester was even as he turned his formulation on its head.  We are hopelessly fractured and sectarian now.  There is no consensus figure: for every would-be titan who might seem to you the embodiment of what it's all about, there's someone out there to proclaim, "They suck!" (Bruce intones these words with withering glee, especially when turning them back on himself).  By the time I came along I was into "alternative," whereas for Bruce rock & roll itself had been the alternative.  If anything, though, when Bruce spewed out that bravura litany of far-flung rock splinters and sects--pausing only to ponder something called "Nintendo core"--the point was to diagnose the hilarious health of the scene.   

When he talked about how much the Animals meant to him--by far the most important British invasion band for him, it seems--it took me straight back to hearing him do "It's My Life" on one of my bootlegs.  Just like he says, the song fit perfectly with the cataclysmic, punk-influenced "Darkness on the Edge of Town" material.  This song was not an "oldie" the way Bruce played it: this was life or death.  This singer was saying, listen: this is MY story. 

"It's my life, and I'll do what I want...It's my life and I'll think what I want."  I remember sitting stunned and exhilarated by the sheer force with which he spit out that "Don't PUSH ME!!"  (And that "Show me I'm wrong" line--the one Bruce says blew him away--that always knocked me out as well.)

The Animals brought class consciousness to rock & roll, the same way Bruce brought a budding class-consciousness to me in the years we've been talking about.  (I didn't come by it organically: though I've worked some physical jobs, the specter of, say, a factory life should I play my cards wrong never loomed.)  Picking up his axe, Bruce gave us a little songwriting workshop, fascinating for a non-songwriter such as myself, on creative "theft".  The rhythm of the Animals' version of "(Please Don't Let Me Be) Misunderstood" became the framework for "Badlands".

He talked about turning to country music as he grew up--that is, adult music.  Same as it was Bruce's attempts to bring adult subject matter to rock & roll that struck such a chord with me as I became an adult.  Bruce explained why he needed both Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie: Hank said "My bucket's got a hole in it," but he didn't say why.  He never went there, maybe couldn't go there.  Woody supplied the "why".  

He wrapped up the speech with an idea I got from him--or maybe from reading Dave Marsh thinking about him (in my search for identity and my place in the world--I suppose what I've been describing is a resurrection--there was Bruce, there was film, and there was Dave's writing).  I tried to use it when writing papers at the time, and I've tried to hold onto it to this day when doing any kind of critical thinking: "Be able to keep two completely contradictory ideas alive and well inside of your heart and head at all times.  If it doesn't drive you crazy, it will make you strong."  And then he showed what it might mean to do just that: "When you walk onstage tonight to bring the noise, treat it like it's all we have.  And then remember, it's only rock and roll."

Looking around at the committed young bands at SXSW, Bruce showed Lester he was wrong in a way that I'm sure would thrill the man's great heart.  Solipsism does not reign.  We're still out here, fractured though we may be.  And, to paraphrase Wilco again, we still love rock & roll.  

"Devils Don't Forget"

Watching Bob Fisher's plays make me feel the way I feel when I watch David Lynch's films or read Haruki Murakami or Kobe Abe's fiction.  And I mean that as the highest sort of compliment. 

Pauline Kael once wrote of "Blue Velvet", "If you feel that there's very little art between you and the filmmaker's psyche, it may be because there's less than the usual amount of inhibition.  Lynch doesn't censor his sexual fantasises, and the film's hypercharged erotic atmophere makes it something of a trance-out, but his humor keeps breaking through, too.  His fantasies may come from his unconscious, but he recognizes them for what they are, and he's tickled by them." 

I think the same is true of Bob's theater: his work is powerful because there's very little mediation between his id and what ends up on stage.   When you go to see a show by his company, the Mammals, you descend into the basement and into Bob's world.  You're in his unconscious, where all those fantasies come flailing around.  There's a tremendous amount of pain there, and violence against women, and just plain violence.  But it can also be arousing, a darkly comic turn-on.  

He gives us a Grand Guignol, pulp fiction, penny dreadful world, a world of old Poverty Row B-movie film noir thrillers and Universal Horror films.  If I have made a lot of cinematic references, it's because the Mammals makes a uniquely cinematic theater: there's as much Tarantino in there as there is Beckett and Brecht.  It's there in the language, which has the fun, zingy poetry of a Ben Hecht.  But it's in the actor's faces and bodies as well, which evoke a visceral classic cinematic physiognomy, a hard jaw or a curvy form, and extends all the the way to the lighting: the palette of "Devils Don't Forget" is black and white, almost chiaroscuro, which makes the rare strokes and dabs of color all the more vivid.  

The hero of "Devils Don't Forget" is Buster, an amnesiac with blood-stained gauze still clinging to his temples.  Played by Dennis Frymire, he is tormented by various gangsters, femme fatales and monsters.  There is Don Hall as the well-dressed Udo, who wields a switchblade and is a sort of amalgam of those torturers who approach their work with that certain joie de vivre (think Mr. Blonde-Frank Booth-droog).  There is the lissom Annie Hogan, who sure knows how to rock a clingy scarlet gown.  Sara Gorsky plays the woman Buster can't remember but also can't forget.  In a cold world, Sara is warmth: the heart (as the great old atheist once said of religion) of a heartless world. 

Sarah Koerner tickled me as a singularly unsympathetic bartender, hacking like a consumptive and pouring the world's most begrudging cup of coffee.  Gabe Garza is Dumdum, Udo's hapless muscle, evoking in size and demeanor one of the dimmer members of the Sopranos clan, and whom Udo bullies.  And then there is "the Father", some kind of alien or beast with two backs (Justin Warren and Erin Orr), one half of whom pushs its other half in a wheelchair: twisted, poxy decrepitude on wheels.  

Bob's is not a nihilistic vision, not at its heart.  Like Buster, who tells us that his whole life could have been redeemed if he had only been able to comfort an old veteran, there's a humanity at the core of the vision, or at least a grasp to hold on to humanity.  At one point Buster mimes taking something from his pocket and tells us he is holding an egg in his hand.  Although we can see there is nothing there, he asks an audience member to cradle it, wills them to see it.  Like Buster, Bob would like to get you to believe...I'm not sure in what, but in something.  Perhaps the imagination.  In a culture that tries to shut you down at every turn, the Mammals still make theater that wants to open you up. 

Maybe you'll surface from "Devils Don't Forget" as you sometimes do from a particularly vivid, disquieting dream, to find--if only in the instant before relief comes flooding in and you begin to forget--that, just for a moment, you're unsure of what is real and what is not.  

["Devils Don't Forget" is playing Fridays and Saturdays in February at 10:00 p.m. at Zoo Studios at 4001 N. Ravenswood Ave., Ste. B-1. For reservations: 866-593-4614 or themammals@gmail.com]

Robbie Fulks ♥s the Velvet Underground

The vision or version of the Velvet Underground's music that Robbie Fulks and the boys played at the Hideout on January 16 may not have been a complete one--you couldn't do that with such a dimensional band--but it was nonetheless a very personal one: each member of the band had contributed a few personal favorites to the setlist.  It was an irreverent, ramshackle show that walked us around that deformed hydra that is the Velvets’ music, not afraid to tweak its whiskers.    

We tip-toed past the gentle (“Sunday Morning”, “Stephanie Says”), lilted to the pop (“There She Goes Again”, “Who Loves The Sun”, “She’s My Best Friend”), and stomped by the ferocious (deep cut “Guess I’m Falling in Love”, a galloping "What Goes On", the electric charge of "I'm Waiting For The Man").

And they didn't leave off the literary: they actually did Reed’s deadpan-dry, black-comedy short story classic “The Gift”!  I amused (and somewhat scandalized) my friend Beth, who knows not of the Velvets, by reciting key lines of the story in her ear alongside Fulks, who donned spectacles and sat at a lectern (though he didn't try to put on Cale's Welsh accent, despite calls from the audience).  "Waldo Jeffers had reached his limit..." 

We gaped at Grand Canyon-like majesty (“All Tomorrow’s Parties”).  We went looking for redemption in the lovely "Jesus", and found it in the life-affirming “I Found a Reason”.  Lastly we lingered on the whimsical (“I’m Sticking With You” and that little coda “After Hours”, which I've always found oddly moving). 

We’re not gonna play some of your favorites, Robbie told us straightaway, not out of some hipster thing of ‘we’re not gonna play the ones you came to hear,’ but just because there are too many great ones.  And so there was no “Femme Fatale” or “Pale Blue Eyes” or “Sweet Jane” or “Rock & Roll.”  

Perhaps they gave short shrift only to the VU's ice-pick-to-the-skull moments, when sound scorched the world and cracked it open.  They did not quite produce a note piercing enough to split our minds open, though there was a groovy Robbie original (a throwaway ditty with a refrain like, "hey, hey, how'd they get that sound? Ooh, the Velvet Underground") that mashed into a lurching "Sister Ray" and back.  Young couples out for a night out with their arms around one another suddenly found themselves bobbing their heads and grooving to lyrics like “She’s busy suckin’ on my ding-dong/I’m searching for my mainline/I said I couldn’t hit it sideways/Couldn’t hit it sideways….”. 

It was a memorable night of homage to the band and the records from which all "alternative" rock and roll flows.