Three Imaginary Girls - Interview

Imaginary Interview: Jyoti Mishra – feeling blue in White Town

Matt Schild — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 16:29:41 +0000

There’s always a bit of melodrama involved when a indie singer/songwriter or emo type in his early 20s writes about his life-destroying breakup: Dudes, you’re in your twenties, you’re supposed to have a horrible romantic life. Things get a lot more devastating to listeners when the songwriter is White Town’s Jyoti Mishra, an indie-pop veteran in his mid-40s and he spends an entire album sorting through the wreckage of his personal and romantic life after a decade-plus marriage goes down the tubes on Monopole. It isn’t quarter-life odes to The One That Got Away, but lamenting the irreplaceable loss of The One. For a guy best known for his 1997 mega-hit “Your Woman,” it’s a startlingly direct look inside his personal life.

It’s not like Mishra hasn’t attempted to distract himself from his loneliness. He started (and dropped out of) sociology and creative writing programs at the University of Derby. He buckled down and Monopole as the second release from his own label, Bzangy Groink, handling virtually everything from song inception to fanzine-level press. Still, there are events that define a life, and it’s hard not to come away from Monopole, with its start-to-finish chronicle of his wrecked relationship, with the feeling that Mishra will never be able to truly put the past few years behind him.

TIG: After all the misery that’s helped inspire this album, does it feel like it’s behind you with the release of this album?

Jyoti Mishra: It’s been a weird process, as you know. It would have been a lot sooner, because the last album was 2006, 2007. With divorce stuff and my parents being ill, it’s been difficult to get a continued bit of time to keep working. It’s taken much longer than I would have liked. I’m not like through the thing of being through it yet. It’s still in the process. It’s not like it’s a past album yet. When it’s a past album, I’ll be able to draw on it. It still feels too current. Everything I’m singing about on it feels too now, you know?

Is that because you’re so involved in every aspect of it, handling all songwriting, performing, recording, album art and running the label, are you more immersed in the emotion tied into the songs?

JM: I think if I handed it off to anybody else, even down to the videos and stuff. I know it’s my own fault, because I’m too much of a control freak. I want everything to be right. It’s partially based on bad experiences before, which were a long time ago. I’m talking about EMI stuff. When you work really hard on something and get a graphic design back that’s just awful, it kind of puts you off to working with other people again. [Laughs] I know there’s probably great people out there that I could use, but I’ll just do it myself, even though I’m not really a graphic designer. I just knock up something that will do.

After having problems with other people in the past, do you get to the point where it’s just easier to do everything yourself than try to explain your ideas and struggle with other people?

JM: I’m not a trained graphic designer, so it’s always going to be worse if I do it myself, because I haven’t got that knowledge or craft, but it will be better than someone doing a botched job, like a slick botched job. The same with videos; I’ve already made a few short films. I’m not a filmmaker. I’m sure if I had the money and the ability to hand it over to a proper director, I’d get back the videos that were vector-edited and all that kind of stuff. But, A) who can I find to do it, and B) I can’t afford it. It’s like you just do it yourself. It’s partially political, and partially no money.

I think that’s why a lot of the original DIY stuff died off. A lot of people rewrite history and say, “Oh, it’s because they wanted to be independent,” and all that. Often, it’s because you couldn’t afford to do anything else. You just had to. People laid out fanzines on typewriters because who’s got the first version of Quark Xpress when it came out? You didn’t have that kind of stuff. You had to do it on typewriters.

The best way to force yourself to learn anything is to jump in the deep end and say, “This has to be a finished product,” isn’t it?

JM: In the end, I ended up doing the design for the EMI albums. They took me to all these graphics people and we went through the process. I got this hideous thing back. I just said, “Look, I’ll just knock something up.” Actually thinking about it, apart from a couple of EMI singles, which were horrendous designs, everything I’ve produced has been designed by me. You can tell. If you look at the very first album, which is very, very laid out in a word processing program, because I didn’t have access to (desktop publishing programs) up to now, I think it’s got better. [Laughs] I only do it once every three or four years, so I don’t get much practice. If I was designing an album a week, I’d probably be a lot better by now. The same with the videos. When I finally do the 10 or 11 videos for this album, by the time I’ve done those I should be a lot better at making videos.

Why did you choose to make a video for every track on the album?

JM: It’s a twofold thing. First of all, I love film and am an ex-film student. That’s part of my wanky background. I like thinking about narrative visual flow. I love the old “Your Woman” video. That was directed by Mark Adcock. He came up with all the ideas, but we talked about it loads. We were both into the same stuff, like German expressionism, and not having typical slow motion. Still, now 20 years later, I see so many videos that are slow-mo because they can’t think of anything else to do! It’s like, “Let’s have a shot of that band hitting some drums in slow-mo because it looks more expressive and powerful.” No it fucking doesn’t. It just looks stupid. Or the live videos! We know you’re not plugged in. We know you’re not playing the song. What’s that about? It’s OK if it’s Coldplay or U2 or something like that. You expect them to be shit and boring.

When it’s a new band of twentysomething kids that are meant to be a punk band or something, you think, “Already? Already you’re doing this?” It’s like a genre convention. They’ve seen what rock videos are meant to look like, so they want theirs to look like that. The same with Auto-Tune. People hear Auto-Tuned vocals and they want their vocals to sound like that, whether they can sing or not. I heard, I can’t remember the band, a proper lo-fi, shambling indie band. They were sort of like an All Girl Summer Fun Band, which I love, they were that kind of style, but they Auto-Tuned the vocals! The vocals, which are meant to be a bit out of tune, a bit shambly and Pastels-y and Marine Girls-y were just in tune, and horribly in tune. Like, it made you want to tip your head sideways like a dog in tune.

Why do you think Auto-Tune’s become so widespread and accepted instead of being reviled?

JM: I think the basic reason is because people are twats. People are just imitating monkeys. They just hear someone. I’m not knocking the guy, he might be lovely and really good to his mum and all that, but when the Owl City thing came out, all these people who said they loved it, had they never heard Postal Service? It was just a slap in the face for anyone who’s ever heard Postal Service or anything that Ben Gibbard’s ever done. (Owl City’s Adam Young) just ripped his style completely. Then he Auto-Tuned it, and it was, “This is a modern thing! This band is like this.” Well, Ben Gibbard sings like that live. I’ve seen Death Cab live. He sings more in tune than he did on the record! The man’s a fucking tuning robot. He’s never out of tune. He didn’t need that. His records are a correct representation of how he sings. He’s a beautiful, wonderful singer

I’m not so good. I’m not so tuneful. When I’m recording stuff, I want it to sound like me. Otherwise, people hear the record and they come to the shows and are, “Well, he’s shit. He sounds nothing like on the record.” I know you can use Auto-Tune live now, but that just boggles my brain why people would do that.

I hate what I call ProTools punk now. Everything is beat-detected into time, everything is Auto-Tuned, all the guitars are looped about and jumped about. If you think about it, and I’m sure you have, the records that come out now are more electronic than the records Kraftwerk made. There’s less manipulation on a trance or house or dubstep record. People just get some sequences going, and just taped it. With modern guitar rock, I’ve seen bands with studios machine songs. They just take a second of one guitar from somewhere, and stick it on another second of guitar and take some feedback and make the start exciting, even though it wasn’t really there.

That eventually comes back around to haunt bands when they try to perform and can’t even approximate their album.

JM: It’s a valid artistic thing to do. I don’t mind Aphex Twin doing that. I find it a little bit weird when a rock band does it. Just record the shambling live sound, and leave it at that. One of the things that this album is about, apart from my horrendous love life, is just trying to do something that feels – I’m sounding like Neil Young, aren’t I? – that feels more raw and more real and less worried about how it’s received. If a musician says they don’t care what people think about their record, they’re lying. Every musician is always worried if you have half a brain thinking, “How’s it going to sound?” That’s just how you record stuff.

With this thing, I was thinking I just wanted to do it so it’s not fashionable or like a dubstep breakdown, you know what I mean? No ravey synths going on for no reason.

Was it difficult to break from all the modern influences that seep into your songwriting unconsciously?

JM: Yeah. With the songwriting process, I mostly write on guitar and transfer it to either guitar or keyboards. The song is just a song. I have to decide how to frame it. Is it a synth song or is it a guitar song? What serves it best? Then, you kind of think, “What should I use?” The electronic songs on the album, they’re pure electronic songs. How do I frame them? Do I try to make them sound more contemporary, or do I do things that I like, which is going to make them sound more ’80s-ish? In doing that, is it going to make them sound ’80s contemporary? You can go around in circles and go mental. You think, “Oh God, that sounds too ’80s. People will think I’m trying to be ’80s.” Then you have to stop yourself and go, “Fuck it. Do I like this sound? Does it suit the song?”

Is it tough to write a song on the guitar then take in in a direction on other instruments?

JM: It’s not actually something I invented. Depeche Mode used to do it. It was an old trick of theirs. When they started off, they were a guitar band and they switched to synths because they heard Gary Numan and liked it. It’s good to do that. Also, I will go the other way. I will write things on keyboards and move them to guitar because you end up with these songs that if you’ve been writing a long time, you have a specific way of approaching an instrument, a rut. It’s hard to keep out of those ruts. If I write something on the guitar, I do chords I wouldn’t do on a keyboard, and when I transcribe them, it’s all, “This goes to what now?” I’m trying to play them and it’s all weird shapes and vice versa. Things I write on the keyboard, when I move them to the guitar, I can’t play them because I’m a shit guitar player. I’ve now been recording myself for 29 years now, so I need to find ways of not being comfortable in the studio.

Do you spend a lot of time developing songs as recordings verses traditional songwriting?

JM: A lot of the time I spend is what I call mooching time. The only way I can describe that is, if you’ve ever read any books by or about mathematicians, they’re always going on about how they were trying to work on a problem and they couldn’t do it, and they went for a bike ride or walked over the river or went to the café and suddenly it clicked in their head. It’s the same with songs, for me at least. Every song on that album, or anything I’ve ever done, comes from this weird kind of feeling inside me that something is kind of wrong. I don’t know what’s wrong. It’s kind of disquiet. You feel unsettled. It’s like you can kind of see something out of the corner of your eye, but when you look, it’s not there. It’s a kind of weird feeling. Then I kind of know that’s a song. I’m feeling something and I don’t quite know what it is. You have to write the song to get out what the feeling is.

To a certain extent, once you’ve done that, that’s cathartic. It reduces or minimizes it, if you do the job well. If you do it badly, it’s still there. So, it becomes like a mathematical problem in my head. I’ll have this feeling, but I won’t have a handle on what it is that I feel. Then I’ll go and do mooching time, which is going to a café or taking photos or doing something that is not related to music at all, and then the song will come out. Like, I’ll have a lyric just come into my head, or I’ll have a stanza or sometimes the whole thing will just pop into my head. Unlike a lot of people, I don’t sit in the studio bashing away at stuff. I have to have the feelings first, then the idea and then the song writes itself. It’s really easy.

So you need to have a weird feeling to seed a song?

JM: The more emotionally unstable I am, the more I write. It’s been a really bad three or four years, but in terms of writing, it’s been amazing because I’ve just been writing and writing and writing. Sometimes I’ll write three or four songs in a day. I’m not saying they’re good songs, but I’ll do them and they will mean something. I don’t know if they mean enough to play to other people, but they work for me. Out of those songs, I’ll pick things that I think are worth other humans’ ears. Writing isn’t a problem for me. I thought as I got older, it would be. In fact, it’s gotten easier.

After you exercise those weird feelings by writing songs, do you have emotional flashbacks when you return and listen to that song later?

JM: Yeah. Sometimes it does, especially when you’re mixing them. Doing the album was a little – a little? I’m exaggerating – it was hugely strenuous. If I’m mixing a song, I usually listen to it 40, 50 maybe 60 times if it’s a difficult mix. Then, it comes to mastering, I have the body of songs and I have to master them. On the album, you know that there are electronic tracks next to feedback-y guitar tracks. It wasn’t easy to balance them all together and make them feel like some kind of whole, because they are really hard to have them sit next to each other. During that process, I had to listen to the songs at least 100 or 150 times each, altogether. When you go back, sometimes you go back and listen and go, “This is horrendous. I don’t want to listen to this anymore, but I’ve got to mix it,” and it’s like picking a scab. Other times, you go back and you listen and you hear it and think, “This is OK. I did OK on this.”

You’ve always seemed to be very straightforward with your music instead of dressing it up or complicating it.

JM: It’s not poetry. You don’t need a thesaurus to work out what I’m writing about. When I was doing creative writing in Uni, which I’ve dropped out of, I had this end-of-year project and you had to write about a book of poetry. You had to write about poetry. I said to my lecturer, “Can I write about a science fiction book instead?” [Laughs] She’s like, “Are you submitting science fiction stories? You need to write about poetry.” I’m like, “Well, I don’t like poetry.” She’s like, “Why do you write poetry?” “I write poetry that I like. I don’t like reading it.” Of course, her response, which is true, was, “You need to read more poetry. There will be stuff out there that you like.” What I said to her was, “I don’t want to read stuff that’s trying to be clever.”

I don’t want to read stuff where I have to rub my fucking chin and go, “Oh! Interesting!” Just say what you fucking mean. I don’t have time to hang about. Nobody else has time to hang about. Just fucking get on with it and find a way to say it.

{Photo by Natalie Barratt.}

white_town_mishra.jpg

TIG: After all the misery that’s helped inspire this album, does it feel like it’s behind you with the release of this album?

After having problems with other people in the past, do you get to the point where it’s just easier to do everything yourself than try to explain your ideas and struggle with other people?

Imaginary Interview: Zac Pennington - Parenthetical Girls continue their dazzling & dark EP series

Chris Estey — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 20:27:47 +0000

First, the Not Safe For Work/School/In front of blushers new video for Parenthetical Girls' "The Pornographer":

Parenthetical Girls: The Pornographer (NSFW) from Parenthetical Girls on Vimeo.

And now my lengthy conversation with P. Girls' vocalist/songwriter/instrumentalist Zac Pennington, conducted a couple of weeks ago after the third EP of their spleen-kicking, air-ceasing, head-dizzying Privilege releases came out. A gorgeous combination of synth rock and sin city, noise pop and quasi-classical, when stacked together the EPs form arguably my favorite release of the past few months. And there are still two more releases in the series to go. Hence, the heights and depths Zac and I soar and plunge to below:

TIG: I'm drinking a low priced but tasty Scotch Whiskey as I listen to your Privilege Pts. 1 -3 and prepare these questions. Do you intoxicate to create? Perform?

Zac Pennington: I have a fairly weak constitution all told, and my body has a particularly adverse response to alcohol: it makes me incredibly tired, and I tend to feel hangover effects within an hour of consumption. In more heroical times past, I used to use alcohol as a duller of creative self-doubt and second-guessing, but its effects are too unstable for me—I never get anything done. I enjoy more practical and productive vices these days.

When we’re performing, a certain level of personal transcendence is ultimately ideal for embodying the atmosphere of our music. I can’t decide which is the worst part of that sentence: “Personal transcendence” or “embodying the atmosphere”. Ultimately what I mean to say is that in order to communicate a specific sort of emotion in a pop music context—an emotion that’s probably much bigger, more direct, and more interesting than the messy, vain, and docile human trying to convey it—a person has to sort of become that emotion. (This isn’t to say in the sense of some sort of Dionysian catharsis or whatever—I’m/we’re way too self-conscious for that.) Sometimes this necessitates indulgences. Caffeine is especially important for me. I don’t treat my body very well when we’re on tour, but I don’t imagine that many people do.

I link to all ages shows, so that's why I asked. Do you prefer your listeners to your work soberly -- and if not, what would you personally recommend to accompany your music?

Zac: I’d never really thought about it, honestly. We’re not a group that people tend to gravitate to in order to have a good time—so you would have to assume that any imbibing would be done out of misery more than mirth. I wish we were more of an MDMA group, now that you mention it. I don’t imagine that’s in the cards, unfortunately.

Are there specific reasons you've chosen to follow up your last full length, Entanglements, with three four song EPs? What are they?

Zac: Privilege is an experiment. Until Entanglements, I had released the majority of Parenthetical Girls’ material via my own label, and had done so with the freedom to take liberties wherever I wanted to with format, packaging, promotion, etc. When we released Entanglements, we decided that the time was right to make a more traditional go of it—we did all of the logical things that an independent pop group in our position is supposed to do, save making a particularly accessible record. Besides not being especially fruitful for us, the whole process felt off. If we’re destined to be bridesmaids regardless, we may as well do things exactly the way that we want them to be done.

Beyond that, our pace is just totally glacial. The notion of spending another two years working on another ridiculous concept record seemed deeply unappealing, and with the increasing irrelevance of the traditional album format, it felt like an interesting challenge to devise more creative ways of conceiving and releasing music. The results of this experiment have yet to be fully tabulated.

I think of the EP as the best medium for rock and roll. Singles are too narrow and albums are too much. Do you have an opinion about this, and favorite EPs yourself?

Zac: I whole-heartedly agree. The EP is given such short shrift by most contemporary musicians—it’s usually just a dumping ground for half-thoughts and toss-offs. But the EP is totally ideal for conveying discrete conceptual ideas in a way that’s neither undercooked nor bloated and pretentious. EPs are compact, efficient, and perfectly digestible. Slender Means Society—the boutique label that I run—has a long history of almost exclusively EP releases: Final Fantasy/Owen Pallett, Xiu Xiu, Grouper, The Blow, Lucky Dragons, The Dead Science… they’ve all released EPs on Slender Means Society.

Some of my personal favorite EPs include the self-titled Sonic Youth EP, This Heat’s Health & Efficiency, Come On Pilgrim by The Pixies, Beware by The Misfits, The Bad Seed EP by The Birthday Party, Slates by The Fall, The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour, and Green Cosmos by Deerhoof.

Why is Privilege the umbrella title for this series?

Zac: Privilege initially began as a concise concept EP that was meant to fuse 20th-Century Minimalist aesthetics with straightforward Pop music—a series of four songs about class and the personal politics therein. Around the time that we began working on that project, the line-up for the group (as it often does) shifted, and so I decided to lump those songs into a greater work. I had sort of fallen in love with the phonetics of the word by that point, and with its suggestiveness. The theme of privilege is surprisingly elastic. Besides, the idea of putting the word “privilege” across such a plainly narcissistic object was just too good to pass up.

The body. Sort of a beautiful, fucked up thing isn't it?

Zac: It’s a horror that every one has to face on a daily basis. It’s a shell and a cell and a heavy-handed metaphor all in one. The body is the perfect landscape for popular music.

Is anything eternal?

Zac: Hope. Unfortunately.

Are the topics in your lyrics -- about car crashes, bodily functions, deformity, transgressive seduction, and bizarre violence ones you're fascinated with personally, or are you simply making arresting art?

Zac: I guess I don’t really think of the topics in our songs as inherently very transgressive or inflammatory, though I acknowledge that in the realm of pop music they aren’t exactly the norm. I decided a long time ago that I could only devote my life to the practice of pop music if I felt that I had something new to say about it. I’m not interested in writing traditional love songs, or writing from the exhaustively well-worn point of view of the “sensitive masculine identity”. While this has made for a great deal of the music that I think of as totally formative, shit is more often than not boring as fuck.

At the same time, I’ve always been absorbed by with the beauty of somewhat morbid fascinations and ideas—things that rarely find their way into accessible pop music in sincere and thoughtful ways. I felt that the only way I could justify my role as a songwriter was by exploring something that I related to intimately, and that I felt hadn’t been otherwise voiced in a way that I felt entirely satisfied by.

Entanglements had a lot of ornate organic string-led arrangements going on; these twelve songs have an even broader musical scope, with wildly cinematic synth-pop ("Young Throats"), avant noise-rock ("The Common Touch"), torch ballads ("Found Drama l"), and grit-teethed rockers ("The Pornographer") spread over the six sides of vinyl. How on earth did things get so out of hand (in such a good way)? Have there been other such incredibly diverse records that inspired this melee, or is this a unique desire on your part?

Zac: Diversity has been part of the beauty of the Privilege project: we work in vacuums within each session, and work to make each concise recording as distinct as you might a full length record. Truth be told, we are creatures of self-sabotage: just as people seemed to begin to care about our humble home recordings we 180’ed with a dense orchestral record, and just as we began to gain some momentum with Entanglements, we found a myriad of other tangents to explore. Parenthetical Girls have never had much of a “sound” per se, and I think that’s been alienating to a lot people. For us, the disparity feels strangely organic. Everything we’ve ever made sounds like Parenthetical Girls to me.

What role did music journalism play in shaping your own music making? You've been an editor and a critic yourself; are you making the music you wish to hear? Has this changed over the course of PGs, with all the different forms its taken and sounds you've made?

Zac: I think what drew me to music journalism is in many ways the same thing that drew me to music making—I am a fairly particular person by nature, and though I wouldn’t go so far as to say “discerning,” I do perhaps view the world through generally critical (some would say cynical) eyes. I’ve never really pretended to know what is quantifiably “good” or “bad,” nor have I ever really had a sense that my particular taste was in any way superior to anyone else’s—I just simply have a fastidious personal aesthetic that I’m perhaps too quick to communicate.

In music criticism, I found a place to actively define that aesthetic, but it led to a really toxic and parasitic relationship with music—writing so actively about what I thought was wrong with the pursuits of others, rather than trying to create something aesthetically valuable to me. It made me hate music, and loathe myself for what I felt was mostly a destructive urge inside of me. My relationship with music journalism at this point is almost entirely inverted. I’m playing penance for the years of callous, mean-spirited rock critique. I think my dues are nearly paid.

When I call something "record collector rock," I usually mean it as a bit of a backhanded compliment -- there are songwriters who are making pop music for people who get thrilled from cultural "recognition." With Parenthetical Girls, it seems more like a literary device that you lyrically reference so much new wave, post-punk, and other genres and artists. Sort of like a musical approximation of how good writers catch flakes of Nabokov, Chekhov, and others in their work. Why do you do this so much ("the kick inside," et al), and are there inside jokes tying song topics to musical references?

Zac: I’m a sucker for context. For re-context. It’s no secret that I’m an obsessive Morrissey fan, and from very early on I’ve been fascinated by the rampant creative plagiarism exhibited throughout his entire career. I think for Moz, it’s been a way of further aligning himself with the cannon of what he sees as his literary significance—the same kind of self-mythology he used when he turned all of his teen idols into cover stars… endorsement by proxy. He has always been fond of that old “genius steals” adage of Wilde’s. The idea of forming self-mythology by donning the mythology of others has always been a really interesting one to me.

For me—and believe me, I’ll be apologizing for this one—I think of it as more akin to pop dramaturgy. An effective pop song is fairly limited in the information it can convey: it’s brief, it has a generally constrained structure, and its most important objective is to express an emotion. Using words or musical motifs that other people have used in other contexts allows a song to be more multifaceted—to suggest more avenues and extra-textual narratives and ideas—without necessarily detracting from the concise power of the pop song.

I don’t think that there is really anything wrong appropriating other people’s ideas as long as it’s done unabashedly, and with intellectual intent. I’ve never plagiarized a work without being fully convinced that I was contextualizing it in a way that gave it new meaning. There are a lot of jokes. “Ellie Greenwich” perhaps has the most recognizable sonic punchlines. I gather that most people think that we take ourselves very seriously, or just don’t think we’re very funny.

It helps that you subvert the musical forms as you sing about them, too. On Facebook we briefly discussed the song you made which referenced CRASS's satirical take on the love song ("Our Wedding"), which also ended up as a hoax played on readers of the UK bridal Loving magazine. Which song is this of yours and, for example, why did you wish to "work with it"?

Zac: We borrowed elements of the melodic structure of “Our Wedding” for a song called “Young Eucharists.” Perhaps it’s buried enough that it doesn’t read. “Our Wedding” is a philosophical mindfield—the more pendantic/conceptual reasons for borrowing from it are myriad, and fairly straightforward in a comparison between the two songs, I think. But to be honest, in the case of “Our Wedding,” I had always just been struck by how effectively melodic that song is—and how funny. In the context of CRASS’ discography (along with that fabled Crassmas 7”), it’s just very remarkable and inspiring that a band renown for its humorlessness and absence of musicality could pull such a coup so convincingly. Onion layers.

What magazine would you like to sneak a sartirical song on to a sampler of? And what would you like to make fun of?

Zac: Do they still print magazines? I’d love to do a Gary Glitter-style Jock Jam for some knuckle-dragging sub-Maxim.

Also, what are some genres or artists you've sampled (details kept discreet, of course) -- and those you would like to sample that you haven't tried yet, but would like to do more so?

Zac: To clarify semantics: we reappropriate and plagiarize rather than “sample”—we’ve only ever used one actual song sample, and it was a very long time ago. But in terms of borrowing, we touch on more or less anything that finds its way into my record collection. It’s not all that different from most derivative contemporary pop bands, snatching up Buzzcocks and GBV riffs and then reselling them as their own—we just foreground that process, commenting on it directly rather than pretending it’s not there. This inherently changes its meaning in some way, but I/we tend to use elements in ways that subvert their initial meanings to begin with. Either that, or it’s just intellectualized robbery.

What is the line up for the band right now, both for the three EPs and what we expect to see/hear live?

Zac: The only members that have stayed consistent throughout Parenthetical Girls’ convoluted history are Jherek Bischoff and myself. Though it features contributions from a number of other (((GRRRLS))) past and present (Matt Carlson, Rachael Jensen, Sam Mickens, and Jonathan Sielaff all make appearances), the Privilege project is foremost a collaboration between Jherek and I. The live band remains in flux—turn-over is high, and it’s difficult for me to explicitly state what it will look like from one day to the next. I can say that anyone paying attention will probably not recognize most of the people on stage the next time they see us. To paraphrase: If it’s me and your Granny on bongos, it’s a Parenthetical Girls gig.

Can you tell us about a little about the artist for and the phenomenal artwork on these covers for Privilege?

Zac: Jenny Mörtsell is a Swedish illustrator living in Brooklyn. As our discography can attest, I really admire illustrators with a strong and recognizable personal aesthetic, and I decided a couple of years ago—without her knowledge or consent—that Jenny would illustrate the Privilege series. I love her work so much. I begged her to be a part of this basically no-budget project in spite of the fact that we couldn’t quite meet the rates that she regularly (and rightly) pulls for her work, and she kindly agreed. I can’t say enough nice things about her.

Plans now? Combining it all into a full length; look for a label to do so; tour-wise?

The Privilege project won’t be concluding until we’ve finished the fifth EP—the fourth is recorded and waiting to be mixed presently. Beyond that, plans are a little hazy—we plan to compile the best of the five EPs into a proper album, but nothing is totally concrete at present. We will be touring again soon. It has been too long.

First, the Not Safe For Work/School/In front of blushers new video for Parenthetical Girls' "The Pornographer":

Portrait of an Artist: Scott McCaughey of the Young Fresh Fellows, the Minus 5, R.E.M., the Baseball Project, and more

D. Crane — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 04:19:14 +0000

I was too young/too uncool to listen to the Young Fresh Fellows, but I got way into the Minus Five after seeing them play with the Posies at the Mural Amphitheater, when I was in high school. “The Lonesome Death of Buck McCoy” was my first Minus Five CD purchase, from Tower Records by the Space Needle. Since then I have been a constant fan. Their style of mixing playful lyrics with real emotion behind them, has influenced me to write songs. To that I say….thank you Mr. McCaughey. I moved to Chicago in 2002, to teach middle school on the south side of the city as part of Teach for America. It was a rough go, but “Down With Wilco” was one of the few things (pizza, Wrigley Field, and Thai food….oh did I mention burritos?) got me through. I am on my third copy of that album, now on reissue LP.

D. Crane: Down With Wilco is a special record for me. I remember where I was when I heard “The Days of Wine and Booze” for the first time. I still buy it/recommend it to my friends. It is up there with the White album on my favorite albums of all time list. Do you have any special albums like that? Albums that you give to friends? Albums that you think are severely underrated/are as good as Beatles albums?

Scott McCaughey: Yes, I have albums like that. Whenever I'm asked, I go blank though. I try to turn people on to the Bill Fay CD of his first two albums, which coincidentally, Jeff Tweedy turned me onto the night before we went into the studio to start Down With Wilco. I also pass on copies of the first two McGuinness Flint albums -- I stockpile them (at next to nothing, as no one wants them) and then pass them on to those I think might be susceptible to their charms. (John Wesley Harding took the bait and fell hard.) Nazz Nazz by the Nazz; Armchair Boogie by Michael Hurley; Wish You Were Here by Badfinger. Everyone knows Straight Up but WYWH is also a masterpiece! In The Air by the Handsome Family. It's tricky because you have to find stuff that people haven't heard. And in the end, no matter how great, nothing's as good as the Beatles. But all three Big Star albums come close.

I also really love the Gun album. What was the thought behind the “gun artwork?” I also love the rifle on the spine. It makes me feel uncomfortable to have it in my classroom, but don’t think it isn’t hidden beneath a grammar book! My favorite song is “Out There on the Maroon,” do you actually drink white Russians? Have you been to Russia?

I wanted the "Gun Album" artwork to be simple and stark. I wanted it to express the feeling that went behind the songs. That was my distillation of a couple tough years I went through. I HATE guns, but it was the central image that captured the feeling of the record. It's thematic and whatever a gun represents to me felt right in presenting that album to the public. "Out There On The Maroon" took a strange road to its realization on the album. My friend Bob Spires from the amazing and wonderful band The Possibilities (and lately, Nutria) send me a drunken email with a "song/poem" that started with the line about the White Russians. I took it from there and somehow, over a few years gestation, with a few different attempts, it became a song to my daughter. A guilt-ridden song, but one that I hope evokes a bit of positivity into a rough situation. I'm not sure. I love the song. I haven't had a White Russian for thirsty years, although occasionally people tell me I look like The Dude from The Big Lebowski. I love Jeff Bridges. I've been to Russia once, for about 18 hours. I have the furry hat to prove it.

Also, on that song, the guitar line is a musical highlight for me. Seattle is dying to know….who can shred harder…you or Captain Peter Buck?

The fantastic JOHN RAMBERG (currently fronting Seattle's Tripwires) played the nifty guitar leads on "Maroon". You know, neither Peter nor I would ever claim (or aspire) to "shred". Neither of us considers ourself a lead guitarist. Peter is actually REALLY good, and he could do it, but he doesn't want to, thus one of the defining characteristics of R.E.M. as an original and unique and undated band.

I play in a band called BOAT, and I also teach middle school. I can’t see a point where music would provide for me, my wife, and dog/cats. I also think spending my days working with kids in a creative way, provides me with much more to pull from if I am making songs. I think if I just did music I would be bored…and make boring songs. And conversely if I just did teaching, I would be a bored/boring teacher. Do you work any other jobs when you are not playing music? Does working other jobs help make the music more interesting?

I used to work lots of jobs. Luckily I haven't so much, since booking the Crocodile for a year 1993-1994. I've worked at Thrifty Rent-a-Car, a furniture factory (I got to be a pretty good sander), and of course many years in a record store. All of these jobs inspired songs, no doubt about it. Were they good songs? Hmmm, well, I still haven't recorded "I Don't Want To Live Without A Nose" -- probably for the best.

Where do you write most of your songs? Do you start with chords, words, an image?

It varies but more often then not I start with words, because they come to me when I'm driving or walking (I walk more than drive), and hopefully I'll remember them and jot them down at first opportunity. I've forgotten to jot down many of my best songs, which thusly remain unwritten. My best songs happen when I pick up an acoustic guitar or sit at the piano -- might happen more often if I had a fucking piano -- and start playing and the chords inspire a lyric and it all happens at once. That's the real serendipity of songwriting. Surprising how seldom it happens, mostly because I'm always somehow too busy to take the time to let that situation exist.

What is your favorite REM song to play? What is your favorite REM song to listen to?

Man, that's hard! I like playing "Circus Envy" though it doesn't happen that often. "Horse To Water" is a big fave. "Tongue" and "Kenneth". For listening I like "Beach Ball" and "At My Most Beautiful" and "Summer Turns To High".

If you had to put together a new band for the Minus Five, and could choose from any musicians living or dead….who would you choose? (Yes, you can choose Peter Buck.)

Irma Thomas on vocals. Peter Buck on 12-string guitar. Paul McCartney on bass. Allen Toussaint on piano. Jeff Tweedy on lead guitar and vocals. Steve Berlin on baritone sax and mellotron. I'm not sure my participation would be necessary at all! Except maybe driving the van (daytime only.)

What is the next project or project you are involved with?

Doing this incredibly fun Tired Pony thing. Me and Peter with Gary Lightbody of Snow Patrol, plus Richard Colburn from Belle & Sebastian, and Iain Archer, and Troy Stewart, and Garret "Jacknife" Lee. New album out now, and it's amazing. Also hard at work finishing the next Baseball Project album and the next R.E.M. album!

{Don't miss Scott with the Young Fresh Fellows at the Tractor July 23rd!}

{Art by D. Crane}

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{Art by D. Crane, The Young Fresh Fellows play July 23rd at the Tractor}

Imaginary Interview: Johnette Napolitano from Concrete Blonde

Imaginary Amie — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 15:04:38 +0000

I’ve already declared my adoration for Concrete Blonde, and recommended you come see the show with me tonight (Thursday, June 24) at The Showbox – and now I get to present something super-awesome: I asked Johnette Napolitano a few questions via email about Bloodletting and this 20-years-later tour, and she responded with some great answers:

What was the inspiration to move from your previous punk rock vibe to a more gothic feel for Bloodletting?
Being other places in the world, and I'd never been anywhere but California, and Tennessee was the first place I lived other than LA, really. That was our third record and we'd toured a lot by then and I'd spent a lot of time - and I still do - in New Orleans and the South, and I love it down there and it's moody, for sure. Fucks with my hair something awful, but well worth it.

Do you think it’s awesome or hilarious that "Bloodletting (The Vampire Song)" became a Goth club standard in the 90s?
Awesome, hilarious, horrible, scary, weird, surreal, beautiful, a pain in the ass and very, very lucrative.

What was the catalyst for re-releasing this album and how does it feel to be touring with it again?
20 years seems to have gone by. A perfect storm, really. I lost my Dad and am still very much dealing with that, and he would have said, do it! He was very proud of the band. Never quite came out and told me so, but he didn't have to. I played for him the last time I saw him, he'd bought a guitar for himself. Only he and I would know what that gesture meant…I see a future for myself that I like, and I'm very lucky, we're very lucky, to still have an audience that would actually show up. That never ceases to amaze me. We'll have a great time and I'll come off and write and paint and work on opening a Flamenco place in New Orleans and we'll just play where we want to play, when we want. It's a good place to be.

Any chance we’ll see a new Concrete Blonde album emerge from this reunion (a girl can hope!)?
I'm hoping that we're not killing each other by week two. We won't though, everybody seems to be working in the same direction and after the last year basically a month of playing and sleeping on a bus while somebody else gets me there sounds good. I'm looking forward to it; I know we all are. I'll let the music take over and see where it goes.

Bloodletting.jpg

Imaginary Interview: Bass Ackwards

Imaginary Amie — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 11:41:21 +0000

Photo Credit: Victoria Holt

Another favorite of mine at SIFF this year was the charming road trip movie Bass Ackwards. I grabbed some time with Director Linas Phillips and his co-star, co-writer and friend Davie-Blue to talk about the experience of making this film.

While Linas is a self-described brat and I was never sure what was true and what was said in fun, the interview was fantastic and I can’t wait to see what these two do next.

I thought Bass Ackwards was great, and the thing that really made it great (in my opinion) is that Linas’s character was so loveable that you want him to be okay. You’re really rooting for him to make it.

Linas: He doesn’t seem annoying? Because he’s not getting his shit together?

No. I feel like everybody’s been lost like that at some point…

L: Everyone’s been annoying? Annoying doesn’t exclude empathy, maybe.

I didn’t find him annoying at all. (turning to Davie-Blue) Did your character find him annoying?

L: Or did you?

Davie-Blue: No, I think she wanted to have sex with him. But I do kind of find him annoying, personally. Well I don’t know if annoying is the word. I guess, yeah.

L: Frustrated with? No?

DB: Yeah, I guess it is frustrating to watch somebody not take the bull by the horns.

L: Right, but I think maybe he comes off like someone who shouldn’t be acting like that. So maybe it’s less – because if they’ve always been like that, and they’re forever going to be like that, there’s no reason to watch them.

DB: Right. So it’s actually effective. Put some fire under everybody.

L: It’s like a contradiction that he can’t do anything, but he seems like he should be someone who can.

DB: Yeah, it’s the challenge that he has, and you have hope for him. It’s exactly what you’re saying.
Yes, I was sympathetic towards him – right off, for an unknown reason.

DB: And you see his potential. You want to help him.

L: I think earlier on in the scene at the wedding where you see him talking to this little kid, even though it was just something that we shot spontaneously, I think it was really important to have that in there. One, because it was so real that it helps with the authenticity, and if we didn’t have that in there, it would have been harder to show his nice side immediately. You see it very quickly, you find out so much about him in this short scene with the kid.

He’s interested in kids, and he’s doing a wedding – but there’s something not right, I mean he could be like a weirdo who just flirts with all the girls at the wedding. I think I’ve done that when I’ve shot weddings for real.

DB: That moment when he says, "Do you wanna go now?" to that little kid, giving him a chance to run off, is so unique, because that requires such a sensitivity and most grown men would not have that sensitivity and observation and love for a little person. And so you learn that not only is he a nice guy, but he’s a special guy. It’s a very touching moment, I think.

L: Yeah, I never thought of that. I just thought, ok FINALLY he’s letting the kid go. Because he’s kind of annoying him, or making him feel a little awkward. But I also think he really liked the kid. And he’s just enjoying it. Like in the way that you’re like tricking someone, but it’s not as mean as that.

Like, I have a thing where I just like to tease my grandmother or make her wear something weird. And it’s not hurting her, she likes the attention, because hardly anyone ever talks to her, but it’s kind of got that kind of energy.

DB: My dad is like that.

L: Teasing people? I love to just…mess with people. I’m a brat. That’s what it is. I asked Liz if I was mean, and she said, "No, you’re just a brat".

So you said that scene was spontaneous, how many scenes did you…

L: Forty-two.

Forty-two spontaneous scenes?

L: No, sorry, what’s your question?

Was it mostly scripted, or did you just do what felt right at the time?

L: It was a real mixture. The beginning was written, although there is stuff in it that’s not scripted, and then once we started shooting we came up with other ideas. Some of them happened a year later, so some of the stuff on the road trip was scripted afterwards. I was basically trying to save a movie that felt half-finished. I just thought it needed more fleshing out. Whenever we were shooting, it was pretty loose.

Like I think we had stuff written for us when we’re in the hotel, when Georgia and Linas were playing cards, but then we didn’t follow it exactly. I think it’s good just to get it written down, even if it’s bad. Because a lot of times things when you write them, there’s no way it’s going to sound good.

Like the Alpaca scene? That was one of my favorite scenes.

L: I think people are sometimes thinking they’re performing for an invisible person – but they just don’t have anyone around. They’re alone in their life. Because it’s kind of performance, the way that he’s doing that. It’s almost like too much, like I know I’m on camera or something. But yeah, that’s an example where I think if it were written down, we’d be asking why we’re filming it.

But also, what else wasn’t scripted? Um, the girls on the road in the bar, those moments weren’t scripted. They just happened when we got there.

DB: One thing that I wanted to say about that too was that [the film] was very low budget. And just had like a tiny, tiny crew. Very often it was just Linas and his DP, so it wasn’t just the dialog that was improvised, it was everything. You can’t really write a script and then shoot it – unless you have enough money to do that. And we just had to take what we could get. So, I mean, the dialog changed.

L: Yeah, if you’re writing it in a certain way where you’re planning it out more, you’re going to be so frustrated when you have this small of a movie. Like even later on when we added a scene with me and Georgia, where I’m asking her to go on the road with me, that was actually shot this past December in Boston – nowhere near Seattle. But that was just because we were out there, and we had to find someplace where it could work, so we just banged on people’s doors and asked if we could film a scene there.

Yeah, that scene definitely needed to be there, so when Linas sees her later, his reaction makes sense.

L: And that we came up with later too, that stuff was shot much later. There’s a shot where I start driving over the Brooklyn Bridge in 2008, and in 2009 I finish driving over it.

We basically had a few ideas and we shot a little bit for each one, and it didn’t really work, so we came up with the Jim character. So it’s organic, but even stuff later could have happened within the first chunk of filming if we’d had more time…and I’d been smarter.

The Jim character is really interesting to me too, because he’s not exactly a likable guy. He’s very strange and abrupt, but I think it really played off your character’s gentleness. I mean, he just gets in your van and says he’ll go where you’re going, and then he’s cock-blocking you at the bar…

L: There’s actually going to be a sequel called Jim: The Cock-blocker.

That would be awesome.

L: That kind of would be a funny comedy. You know? Jim just cock-blocking people? And then every time he’s just like, "What?"

Yeah, we kind of show the worst version of Jim, I guess. Parts of his character are very similar to how he is in real life. But I guess I just see him as a character that operates outside the laws of social constraint and behavior – because he’s never mean. He is just someone who’s very free. And that’s one thing the Linas’s character isn’t.

Yeah, I felt like you two could be good for each other. I did really enjoy all the characters you met along the way, especially Paul Lazar. I was pretty excited to see him in your film. I love that guy!

L: That scene where we did the impression was a hard scene; it took a long time. There were wide shots where we’re both doing the scene, because he still didn’t really get it. I was just trying to get to it.

So did you have that impression in your mind, then?
[Note: The impression was of a Lithuanian Christopher Walken]

L: Yeah, because I used to do it for real when I did stand-up comedy years ago, and I thought it would just be good to have there. My Lithuanian is so bad, I’m sure even Lithuanian people wouldn’t understand it. I kind of cringe when I think about them seeing it.

He’s really good [Paul] – I know him be cause his wife was a teacher of mine at NYU. He cast me in a play, actually. But then he got a movie, and he didn’t end up doing the play, and I ended up not liking the replacement director, so he always felt about that.

And then we were going to do a two-man show together; we rehearsed a couple times, but I didn’t think it would be good. So it took many years for us to finally be able to work together. But yeah, he really liked my first film, Walking to Werner.

So did you actually take the road trip with your DP?

L: We really were driving across the country, and we towed the Shorty most of the time. We shot from the back of this pick-up truck when I was driving; I didn’t drive it too much though, in real life. Like 5-10 miles at a time. Sometimes, 20 – if we couldn’t find a place to pull over and hook back up. It was a real pain in the neck to undo the tow rig and everything.

We put a lot of work into the car too – these guys, Bug-Aid. They fixed it up. The guy who sold me the car, in Montlake Terrace, is going to come to the screening tonight. He’s all excited. He sold it to me because he bought a flat screen TV.

Are you guys both originally from Seattle?

L: No, I lived here for 4 years and made films here, so I just seem like a native.

DB: I’m an LA native, but I grew up in Seattle. This festival was kind of the beginning of me really falling in love in with film and wanted to be involved in it.

L: She used to work at the festival too, that’s kind of how we met.

So what’s next for both of you?

L: Well, tennis shoes. I’ve always loved tennis, so Davie & I are going to open a tennis shoe shop.

DB: We got a lease in SoHo, this kind of tiny little…

L: Because people need tennis shoes!

DB: Yeah, everyone wears them.

L: Even if you don’t play tennis, it’s fashionable.

DB: There’s not just for tennis. They’re also for skateboarding, basketball, etc.

What’s it going to be called?

L & DB (in unision): Tennis Shoes….Too.

L: Five Brothers Tennis Shoes?

DB: No.

L: I’ve been just writing and trying to figure out what film is next, but it’s probably going to be this film, Rainbow Time. Which is hopefully going to star my brother who is mentally handicapped, and his name is Rimas.

It’s about him living in a home for mentally handicapped people, and it’s a buddy film. There’s a new volunteer at the house, and they start creating a TV show together called "Rainbow Time". Rimas is a complex character, a very cranky guy – hard to be with sometimes, but he’s very funny and endearing. And he’s obsessed with Happy Days. So yeah, Rainbow Time, hopefully this Fall or Winter.

DB: I’m also writing a screenplay right now – my first screenplay. So I’m in that process. It’s exciting and fun.

Can you give me a hint about it? Or are you not ready to talk about it yet?

DB: It’s about a young woman who is lost in her life, and so uptight and disconnected from her own self-communication, and the tragedy of that – but also her awakening. It’s called Fancy Goldfish.

L: And she’s obsessed with Happy Days, right? You stole that!

DB: She’s obsessed with GOLD FISH. She loves gold fish.

L: You stole that idea from me. She sent me the script and it’s all about Happy Days, and I was like uh….

DB: There’s going to be a lot of children in it.

L: Kids are good on camera.

DB: I’m a teacher and a nanny and a baby lover. So I’m excited about that challenge of creating spaces that are really safe for children to improvise and really express their truth, which is so magical. We’ll see if it’s possible. You know what they say – no children in movies. They say, no children, no animals – so I have the goldfish, I have the babies, so we gotta get a boat.

L: I thought kids were good in movies.

DB: I know; you’re a radical.

L: Kids and motorcycles. I thought that what’s it’s about.

Can you talk about the music in the film and what you’re listening to now, what inspires you, etc?

L: Samba.

DB: Well my mother is a jazz singer, Rochelle House, and I’ve been listening to her album a lot lately, and my brother just cut his second hip hop album, so I’ve been listening to that. Raven Matthews is his name. His crew is Faded Theory – teenagers in Seattle.

L: We should make a documentary about him and get it into SIFF! That’d be good exposure.

DB: Yeah, let’s do it now! Let’s do it about him not having enough money to go to college.

L: I don’t think you need college.

DB: Yeah, you need college! You can’t say that if you went to NYU.

L: Yeah, but I still can’t pay off the loans. I just stopped. There’s this great band called the Bill Collectors. It sounds like an iPhone ring, and it just plays on and on, every Sunday morning.

Actually, I just listen to Bob Dylan and Neil Young mostly.

DB: How about Janelle Monáe? Have you been hearing her? She’s a young soul/hip-hop/pop spiritual Diva coming up out of Atlanta. And she is INCREDIBLE. She always wears a tuxedo and does James Brown dance moves, and just weaves together incredible inspiration from all these genres. I think she’s going to be a big deal.

L: Have you heard of Amy Winehouse?

DB: I have heard of that. I think I have, yeah.

L: I think we should, because she’s “up and coming”, we should try to get her to do a tennis shoe for us.

DB: Yeah, with a heel. Maybe she can be in Fancy Goldfish and Rainbow Time.

L: She should be the lead in Fancy Goldfish!

But also, if we could mention Lori Goldston, that’s awesome. She’s a musician here in Seattle and she did the soundtrack with this woman Tara Jane O’Neil (who’s in Portland) to Bass Ackwards.

{Bass Ackwards screened at the 36th Seattle International Film Festival this year, is screening at Northwest Film Forum June 12-17, and is currently available to watch on Streaming Netflix}

Photo Credit: Victoria Holt

Deep SIFF: Beautiful Darling: The Life and Times of Candy Darling, Andy Warhol Superstar

ChrisB — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 13:48:18 +0000

"People who I interviewed said she was the most genuine person they had ever met" director James Rasin told me in an interview about Candy Darling, the transgendered actress who died in 1974 and is the subject of his engrossing documentary Beautiful Darling: The Life and Times of Candy Darling, Andy Warhol Superstar. He added he "I thought was weird because she's a person who is a complete construct, everything is intentionally, layer upon layer, an artifice but becomes someone so completely genuine."

That is one of the central themes and ironies that runs through Rasin's fascinating film, which played at the Seattle International Film Festival this year. Candy Darling was one of the Warhol superstars featured in the Lou Reed song "Walk on the Wild Side" (Reed's band, The Velvet Underground, also had a song about her called "Candy Says") where Reed sings in the second verse "Candy came from out on the Island, in the backroom she was everybody's darling; she never lost a head, even when she was giving head". While not exactly the most positive description one could hope for, Rasin's documentary is far more kind and thorough.

Born James Slattery in the forties sometime (the actual date of Candy's birth is the source of some debate but is most likely in 1944), Candy desired to be a glamorous film star in the tradition of Kim Novak. One of the ironies is that other than Warhol, no one really broke out and became a superstar on that level from The Factory scene. When I asked Rasin about that, he said "it is odd that there were so many people in that circle but no one really broke out of that. Maybe The Velvet Underground or Edie Sedgwick, but she never really did anything on her own outside of the Factory and she died very young." One example he did give was Holly Woodlawn, another transgendered Warhol superstar who was said to have been considered for an Academy Award for her part in the Warhol film Trash. Rasin summarized that "it was very great to be in the Factory scene because it was seen as a stepping stone, and Andy was a theoretically a launching pad and he did give people a much larger stage, so it is a big break, but where you go from there isn't easy."

What makes the film so compelling is a lot of rare audio recordings that primarily came from Candy's close friend and roommate Jeremiah Newton, who loved Candy dearly and started conducting audio interviews with people around the Factory shortly after Candy died. One person he interviewed was Valerie Solanis, who was immortalized in the 1996 film I Shot Andy Warhol because, well, she did. It was a wealth of information that he had saved for almost thirty years before allowing someone to use it for a film. Rasin said he met Newton at a book party at the Chelsea Hotel about twenty years ago and became friends with him. He said "Jeremiah was always supportive and liked what I did. We established a pretty tight bond, so when it was time for him to do something with this stuff and entrust someone with Candy's legacy, all of this stuff he had been clinging on to and protecting for so long, he felt he could trust me with the material."

Newton provided a lot of the material and was also reluctantly a figure in the film, which turns out to be essential. "Originally, he didn't want to be in the movie, it wasn't my idea to have him in the movie, but at some point I realized that he was an interesting character and his relationship with her was so different and unique that we could really learn about Candy from his perspective in some ways but also learn about him and their relationship and bring it out of this fossilized past. It also opened up different themes in the movie about friendships and loyalty and the passage of time, youth as opposed to getting older," Rasin said.

Newton, who is listed as a producer on the film, was responsible for much of the material used in the film. Rasin also noted that Newton "knew they were going to be important and he took a lot of time to do that (conduct interviews), it was part of his own grieving process. He was thinking of doing a book, sort of like an oral history like the book Edie. He had a lot of her stuff. The mother had given him a lot of Candy's belongings. We went back to get the rest and she had destroyed them. He had a lot of the actual journals." He didn't have all of Candy's diaries, though, and Rasin said "some of the most beautiful diary entries he had read into a tape recorder when he was at Candy's house at Massapequa. He found a diary there and read it into the tape recorder but he didn't take the diary and it ended up getting destroyed by Candy's mother. That was in there and so was his own audio diaries." There was still a lot of material to sort through, though, as Rasin said "He just had boxes and boxes of stuff, everything from ephemera and some old video tapes that he didn't even know what they were; we sent them out to New Jersey to get them restored and see what they were. That was that the footage of Candy with Tennessee Williams. It was a real treasure trove."

Not all of the material came from Newton's collection, though, and Rasin said most people were quite willing to let him use it. "People were very, very generous with their material. Some of the things came from Anton Perich, who said no problem; the Warhol Museum was very helpful with the material they had. Except for Paul Morrissey, we didn't have any problems." Morrissey directed a lot of Warhol's films.

The documentary also features Chloe Sevigny reading from Candy's diaries and Patton Oswalt providing the voices of both Andy Warhol and Truman Capote in a conversation. On Sevigny, Rasin told me "she's very much New York and downtown New York. In a lot of ways, I thinks he's the spiritual heir to Candy. She's not a transgender or anything, obviously, but as someone at the nexus of art, film, fashion and downtown New York, she's the one. One of the last things we did was approach her to do that. She then e-mailed me and said 'I heard you were doing this film and I'm really interested; I've always loved Candy Darling and I cherished my copies of her diaries'. She was so great to work with and was so generous with her time and talent. I can't say how much I appreciate how much she did for the movie and for Candy."

The film is a short and quick 86 minutes but it's obvious from talking to Rasin that there was a lot of things he wanted to include but couldn't for the sake of time. He said " You have to respect the medium of filmmaking, for how you structure it and how you tell a story. There's not room for everything. A lot of the interviewees have really interesting things to say but a lot of the time, those things have to get cut out. They always say tighter is better." A second later, he added that a film is "not a scrapbook where you're just throwing in great stuff."

{Beautiful Darling screens at the Seattle International Film Festival at 6:15 at SIFF Cinema.}

Deep SIFF: Meet Monica Velour

ChrisB — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 18:10:23 +0000

"Basically, I told her I want to blow Samantha Jones into tiny little pieces" Keith Bearden, the writer and director of the often very funny new film Meet Monica Velour told me in an interview. By "her", he was, of course, referring to Kim Catrall, who plays Samantha Jones in the now much-maligned "Sex and the City" franchise and who plays the title character in his debut film that recently played at the Seattle International Film Festival.

Monica Velour is a has-been porn star, who may have been remembered for Saturday Night Beaver or Hooked on Hookers, although chances are, she's not remembered at all. She's living in a trailer park in Indiana somewhere and her life is a mess. Sadly, there are few skills that porn stars can take that will help them re-enter the job field and Monica wants to escape the live she has while regaining her former fame. It's like Sunset Boulevard, if, instead of Norma Desmond saying "I'm still big, it's the pictures that got small," she starred in a gangbang.

While the film mostly works as a comedy, its inspiration is rooted in a sad reality. I asked Bearden what was the inspiration for Monica Velour and he told me "I also used to be a film journalist and I interviewed a retired porn star who I thought had done a lot of B-action movies under a different name. She e-mailed me back and said 'no, that wasn't me but I love my fans and for $200, you can spend the night with me on my houseboat in Sausolito'. I thought that 'wow, so that's what happens. $200 so you can spend the night with her becuase that's the only way she can make a living.'" He also added, "right around that time there was Ginger Lynn, who was this huge porn star and she made people millionaires and she was reported as selling her underwear on the internet to raise money to pay for her kid's medical treatment. I thought 'here's some sad things that nobody's writing about'. Porno at that time was a multi-billion dollar industry, bigger than the NFL, opera and Broadway combined. Where's the actor's side? Where's the ugly side? You might think it's all fun, but nothing's all fun and it has a really ugly side."

Having Catrall as the star made a huge difference in getting the film made, Bearden told me. "Having her on board was everything. Kim having a big, big fan base around the world was very important to getting this film made. If we made it with a Broadway actor, or an unknown, it would have never happened. That's the reality of the movie business, especially with a first-time director," he said. He also told me he had a big reservation about casting his star. "The big issue was that I thought she was too pretty for the part. I told her that she's going to have to look bad, older, she's going to need to gain weight. I told her initially I wanted her to gain about 50 lbs and she said only under a doctor's supervision would she and we couldn't afford a doctor. I think she gained 20-25 pounds. She was completely on board with all of that," he said.

Tobe is the other central character to the film. He's a seventeen year old kid who is an obsessive fan of her movies. He's awkward, looks like Napolean Dynamite and has a crappy job running a hotdog truck. He runs into an unusual happenstance when a junk collector offers to buy his truck and lives in Indiana somewhere and sees on the Internet that Monica is appearing at a strip club in the middle of nowhere in the same state. It sets off a sort of unlikely friendship and unrequited romance.

Bearden based the character of Tobe on a Northwest actor who starred in one of his first short films. He told me, "The inspiration for the character of Tobe definitely came from this kid named Dylan Cole, who was the star of The Raftman's Razor, one of my first short films. We had an open casting call and we shot that film in Seattle and Eastern Washington. He showed up in the middle of the summer in a three-piece suit with a big pompadour. He immediately told me his idols were Dean Martin and Sylvester Stallone, who he said was a genius. He was seventeen and a beautiful kid and I looked at him and thought 'you are one weird fucking kid,' just like Monica tells Tobe in the movie. As I got to know this kid more, he was this hot house flower. He never had a girlfriend, he was a virgin. He loved pop culture, a lot of older stuff. I think we live in a society where there are more opportunities to dive into pop culture than ever with the internet and DVDs; everything just co-exists." He went on to say, "as an adult, I didn't realize there were still eighteen year-old virgins. Also, what happens when you have a kid like that and has this fantasy of what women are like and when the harsh reality of that Wizard of Oz fantasy comes into his face?"

The movie is set half in Auburn (Tobe's home) and Indiana (Monica's), but it was filmed in Michigan exclusively. He said he wanted to film at least part of it locally, "as a former Washingtonian, I would have loved to have film the film half in Washington and half in Indiana but that isn't realistic. Plus, much of suburban America is identical: it's cute houses and places to get Subway sandwiches." The location wasn't essential, though. "It's really about two people in non-descript parts of the world," he noted.

Although the film was a low-budget, character-driven comedy, he did see the positive effects on the community. "A woman who has one line in my movie e-mailed me recently to say, and this is a year and a half, two-years later, 'thank you for starting me on my movie career, I no longer have a day job, I'm a professional actress living in my hometown in Michigan'. She's a working SAG actress in Michigan and it's astonishing," he noted and gave another example, "the woman who did the makeup in this movie, she was a twenty year old girl who worked in a salon, she's a full time makeup artist now." He concluded by adding "arts is a fantastic way to employ people... I love bringing the arts industry to people who really need it."

One of the unfortunate realities of making smaller movies is that it is very difficult to get people to see them. Bearden said he hoped to land a distribution deal in the near future and have the film garner a theatrical run in the fall but warned "if you only go see Avatar, it's all you're fucking going to get. I had trouble getting $2 million to make this movie and that's the effects team's lunch budget on Avatar."

A few moments later, he noted "no one wants to look at themselves and say 'I'm Monica' or 'I'm Tobe,' 'I'm this flawed fuckup who is still beautiful.'"

Imaginary SIFF Interview: Ruba Nadda, Director of Cairo Time

Imaginary Amie — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 10:39:23 +0000

One of my favorite films at SIFF this year was the beautiful, intuitive drama Cairo Time, written and directed by the equally beautiful and intuitive Ruba Nadda.

In person, Nadda exudes an open friendliness that instantly made me comfortable. We sat down for a few minutes and discussed everything from Patricia Clarkson’s eyebrows to the fiasco of Sex and the City 2. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that I was captivated by everything she said, and that I’d love to be able to sit down with her and do it again.

Something I really loved about Cairo Time was that it focused on an older woman, because – let’s face it – you rarely see that in films. I read that your previous feature, Sabah, focused on an older woman also.

Ruba Nadda: It’s funny, because people ask me why I’m doing that, and it’s just the characters. I wrote the scripts as well, and the character just comes to my head, and for Cairo Time she was Patricia Clarkson. I saw her beautiful face in my head.

My first feature, Sabah, was about a 40-year-old Muslim woman who had never been in love before and had become stuck taking care of her mother, which happens to a lot of immigrant women. They get the brunt of that – and one day she falls in love with someone who’s white.

With Cairo Time, I just saw her: Juliet was in her late 40s, and I just felt, because I had gotten a lot of pressure from the financiers to make her in her 20s or 30s, and I said NO. This is a character who has a history, a marriage – a 30-year-old marriage. She has children, she’s worked, and for her to feel what she feels at that time in her marriage – you do not feel that in your 20s or your 30s, I'm sorry. You need that history.

I think to be able to see that on screen is great! It’s nice not to always see women in their 20s. And I LOVE Patricia Clarkson. So you wrote it for her?

RN: I did. The thing about the script was that it was a very simple, very subtle story, and I knew that if the roles of Juliet and Tareq were cast wrong, it could be really bad – because I knew that I wanted to capture that subtlety. And I knew that Patricia could break your heart with the flick of her eyebrow. And I don’t know how she does it! I’ve asked her, can you do that eyebrow thing that you do? And she has no clue what I’m talking about.

So she just – I just knew that she was it. I just remember when I first met her, she walked in the door and I knew she was my girl. In real life, she’s just so fantastic. And she’s got so much experience –and she’s soooo Southern. She’s so big in personality. She just became Juliet. She’s a powerhouse.

And when you cast Tareq, were you picturing Alexander Siddig?

RN: I had him in mind as well, yeah. It’s hard to find good Arab men in their 40s for some reason….

He’s really good-looking. I mean, really. REALLY.

RN: Well, yeah! Honestly I needed someone hot…and tall. And his eyes are insane! They’re this green-blue…but the thing about Alexander, because I’ve been a fan of his since [Star Trek:] Deep Space Nine, and then Syriana, he’s just so – there’s something very haunting about those eyes, and there’s something very old-fashioned about him. And that’s what I was looking for, so I hounded him until he said yes.

Had you spent much time in Cairo before deciding to film there?

RN: Yes. I’m Canadian, but my parents are Arab, and so we on-and-off lived in Damascus, during my childhood, and so they would take us on visits to Cairo. And over the years it just kept changing and I had a huge fascination with it.

It’s just such a vibrant, teeming with humanity city. It’s got so much history, but there’s something in the air – I can’t explain it – that just breaks your North American guard down, and I wanted to capture that in this movie. And I was very scared, because no one had ever pulled off shooting entirely in Cairo, it’s like a nightmare, So I didn’t tell anybody how difficult it was going to be. We showed up and I was like, “Surprise!”

Yeah, in addition to the brilliant writing and the characters in this story, the city was just beautiful.

RN: Thank you. Yeah, it is beautiful. But it’s not gentle – and that’s what I loved about it.

You really did capture that, the craziness in the streets with the traffic and the people, and the men following her around.

RN: Yeah, that happens. And it’s bad. It’s not cool. And it’s not older Arab men doing that, they do not like it. It’s the young men. And it’s because 50% of the population is under the age of 25, and the sexes are so segregated. Even as an Arab woman I’m so thankful that I’ve got a Canadian passport, because I’m free. I can wear whatever I want as a woman, and I have that right. I have that independence. And it’s something that the culture doesn’t like to talk about.

You know I’ll get the odd Arab man in an audience who will say, “Hey, that’s not true”. But it is true. I mean, I can’t walk down to the street without being followed, and I will be telling them in Arabic to leave me alone.

I got the idea for Cairo Time because my mother is blonde and green-eyed, and I remember when I was 16, we landed in Cairo and she was walking a little ahead of me at the airport, and this group of like 30 men surrounded her, thinking she was a foreigner. And my dad was like, “HELLO, she’s with me!”.

One of the things I did like about this film, though, was that though Juliet did have bare legs and arms some of the time, she was modestly dressed and she did wrap a scarf around her head when she went to visit the temples, as a sign of respect. And I’m saying that because of the contrast of this with something like Sex and the City 2.

RN: Well, here’s the thing about Sex and the City 2. You can’t take it seriously! I mean, it is cliché, but the thing people don’t realize about a lot of Arab cities, especially Cairo, is that it’s not an Islamic state. It’s very diverse. You have the conservative women, and then you have the women who are so fashionable and modern with tight jeans and stilettos.

Like the character Yasmeen?

RN: Yes, like Yasmeen. And I’ve had other comments from Arabs saying, “Why isn’t she covered?” and I say because that’s not Cairo. Cairo is a fashionable city. The thing that’s interesting now is that there are a lot of young women covering up. The fashion is a full sort of King Tut style hijab, and the eye makeup is out of this world! And everything matches. It’s just crazy.

I’ve talked to them and asked why they bother covering up, and the interesting thing that I discovered is that by looking pious, they’re allowed to leave the house and party with their girlfriends, and stay out until midnight. Because when fathers, brothers, cousins, and other males question them, they’re like, well we’re wearing hijab. And so that hijab actually equals freedom.

And are all male coffee shops like the one Tareq owned in the film common in Cairo?

RN: Oh god yes.

There’s no female equivalent?

RN: No. The females hang out at home – what’s known as “visits”. And mind you, so many times I would accidentally walk into a male only café, and they were cool with it. Immediately they’d get a chair, so it’s not like a misogynist thing. It’s just a social part of life.

The women actually don’t want to be there. There’s other places where men and women can be together…and I think that’s where Sex and the City 2 missed the point. You know, the point is that YES, there’s a lot of oppression of women, absolutely, but it’s not as horrible as it seems.

The thing is, there is something truly wonderful about the States and Canada - we as women do have those rights. We have those freedoms as women which kind of lack in the Middle East, however, there’s something missing [in the portrayal of that].

Yeah, I just felt like it was a cultural and religious respect issue that they [Sex and the City 2] fully stepped on, and made no apologies for.

RN: Yeah, you think? Like when Samantha gets arrested. And that’s one of the things I didn’t want to do, because I am both: I am Arab, and I am Canadian. And what I didn’t want to do is go to the Middle East and impose my values and my belief system on them. So I had to be careful. So, for example, Juliet doesn’t become Muslim. And people have actually asked me why she wears the hijab – and I just say, well out of respect. I mean, when you to Italy and you go to an old church, you cover up.

I’ve noticed that this film is being billed as mainly a “Will they or won’t they” romance, but I felt like it was actually more about Juliet and her journey, and how she changes once she experiences Cairo.

RN: I love you! You’re such a woman. Yeah, it’s really about her and him getting to her. And she’s in love with him – and for this memory to live with them forever, it had to end up the way it did. But is a female thing, and part of being a female filmmaker is that I always had my eye on Juliet from start to finish. I delivered the end based on her.

It’s funny, I had a lot of pressure, again, from financiers, saying that I had to be shocking at the end, and do certain things, and I said no. This is a story about Juliet and I’m not gonna sell my heroine out. I’m not.

Well I’m so glad you didn’t And I’m very interested to see what you’re doing next….

RN: I’m doing a thriller next actually! I feel so lucky with this movie, because it has a US Distributor and it’s coming out in August.

Since Three Imaginary Girls is primarily a music site, what kind of music are you listening to right now? Or what inspired you during the filming of Cairo Time?

RN: I am weird. I love everything. I love Arabic music, opera, classic, modern, I’m strange . You should see my iPod. Like from you know – who sings that song, "Sweet Disposition"? [Ed. note: The answer is The Temper Trap] I love that song. I listen to that from Beyonce to Arabic to Opera – it’s weird.

Who did the score for this film? It was so beautiful…I usually don’t find myself liking that kind of music, but I loved it.

My score for Cairo Time was by Niall Byrne – and I made sure it’s available in iTunes. I love music, and it’s so important to have the right music for a movie.

RubaNadda.jpg

Deep SIFF: Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist, Rebel

ChrisB — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 08:56:42 +0000

In the fascinating and thorough new documentary Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist, Rebel, you don't learn much about the larger-than-life, octogenarian character who spends most of his time in his pajamas and dates women who are at least half a century younger than he is. What you do learn about is a very smart and thoughtful man who has an unmistakable moral compass and has always ended up on the correct side of history.

The film was directed by Canadian filmmaker Brigitte Berman, who is best known for documentaries on jazz musicians Bix Beiderbecke and Artie Shaw. The latter (Artie Shaw: Time is All You Got) won the Academy Award in 1987 for Best Documentary and the former (Bix: "Ain't None of Them Play Like Him Yet") was responsible for Berman and Hefner meeting. When I interviewed Brigitte Berman after her documentary screened at the Seattle International Film Festival, she explained, "it just happened that Bix was Hef's favorite musician. When I won the Oscar for the Artie Shaw film, Hef tracked me down through Mary O'Connor, his right-hand woman, and she called me and said Hef wanted to get a copy of it, so I sent it down. He's been showing it and whenever I was in LA, I was invited to the mansion for movie night. Our friendship grew over music and movies." She further explained "I knew there was so much more behind him because I'd hear him talk after movies and I saw the intelligent and complex side. I decided that I wanted to make a film about him. I wrote up a treatment because I knew that he would never agree to it if someone came up to him and said 'Hef, can I do a movie about you?' The next day, he sent me a fax that said 'I love it and anything you need, I'll give you.'"

While the portrait of Hefner is sympathetic in the film and he is interviewed at length and provided a lot of materials featured, his involvement was minimal. Berman said "he gave me creative freedom, which was extraordinary for me and very important for me as a filmmaker because I don't want anyone to think that I'm a director for hire or that I'm doing it because he asked me to. No, no, no. He was completely hands-off the entire time."

There were no shortage of critics to be interviewed in the film, including feminists like Susan Brownmiller and Christian conservatives like Pat Boone and Dennis Prager. While the decision to ever solicit Pat Boone's opinion on anything should be examined with a skeptical eye, she explained "Victor (Solnicki, Berman's partner and a producer on the film) suggested Pat Boone because he was reading up on Pat Boone and and how, as strong Christian activist, he strongly felt that Hef's influence had broken the moral fiber of America. That was why I wanted to interview him and have him in the film." She added "the most difficult people (to agree to be interviewed for the film) were the naysayers" but she wanted to include more. One high-profile figure that declined was Gloria Steinem, who went undercover as a Playboy bunny for a very critical article she wrote in 1963 detailing how she was treated in the New York Playboy Club. Berman said she refused to participate. While seeking dissent is hardly inconsistent with Hefner's values (controversial, right-wing talk radio host Michael Savage is the subject of the Playboy Interview in the most recent issue of Playboy), having people say "you suck" on screen in literally the story of your life couldn't be easy for anyone.

One of the most surprising aspects of the film is Hefner’s commitment to civil rights. Jim Brown and Jesse Jackson are both interviewed in the film and very highly of Hefner. One story Berman told both in the movie and in her interview with me is "when Hef found out in Miami and New Orleans that black people were kept from coming into the Playboy Clubs, he had to buy [the clubs] back at a loss. He did not care. He knew that it was wrong that the clubs bore his name and he was not going to be associated with that. To this day, he is really proud of that."

She also talks of a kinship between Hefner and Martin Luther King. She says "Hef was very close to Dr. King. When he died, the article about him in Playboy was edited and finished by his widow." She adds "Dr. King was one of those people whose idealism made him ahead of his time. He really stuck his neck out and really believed what was right. I think that was what brought about a kinship between Hef and Martin Luther King, the belief in doing what is right." In the film, Hefner says that few people realize that Dr. King’s dream "was my dream, too."

The guiding theme through Hefner’s life is summed up by Berman who told me, "for him, it was always human rights and anything less than that is wrong."

Brownmiller’s complaint was that the models featured in Playboy set up an unattainable ideal for women to live up to. I’ve always found that argument incomplete not because Anna Nicole Smith was both curvy and a Playmate of the Year but because the magazine has featured lots of women writers and have read fiction by Joyce Carol Oates and political reporting by the late Molly Ivins in the pages of Playboy. Still, Berman says Hefner found Brownmiller to be an intellectually honest critic. "When he saw the film, that longer version, and she mentioned two names of his editors and he laughed and said ‘I'm so glad she was reading the magazine!’ That meant a lot to him and she actually went up in his estimation because she knew the names of his editors."

One of the most enjoyable moments of the film were the clips from the "Playboy" televisions shows Hefner hosted, especially "Playboy’s Penthouse," a program set to look like a cocktail party everyone wanted to be invited to. There is one particular touching scene where Hefner gifts Sammy Davis, Jr. with a cute puppy. It ran for one season, in 1969. Another program, "Playboy After Dark," ran for two a few years later.

While long for a documentary (124 minutes), the film moves at a quick pace and never seems dull or uninteresting. Some events, like Hefner’s marriage to former Playmate of the Year Kimberly Conrad in 1989, are barely covered for the sake of brevity. There is no narration and the story is held together by interviews and rare footage. For the storytelling aspect, Berman said she liked the dimension Mike Wallace brought to the film. "He counted how many naked women were in the magazine! He said he was a prude but he learned to appreciate other sides of Hef that isn't just the naked bodies in the magazine. It's so much more than that. That was one of the reasons he was so important to me. I like the narrative arc that he has from moving from here to here. He still says he's a prude."

The film does cover Hefner’s legal issues, including when Playboy was labeled as obscenity because Jayne Mansfield was featured nude in the magazine (Playboy was never obscene or pornographic) and his challenging of archaic sodomy laws. It was noted several times in the film that if those laws were fairly enforced, most sexually active adults would be serving a minimum of five years in prison for private, consensual acts.

Berman said she spent three years making the film and one issue that hangs over the film is what will happen to Playboy once Mr. Hefner is no longer with us. He’s 84 years old right now and no one lives forever. She told me "His mother lived to be over 100, so there's longevity there! I think it's important to have people like this with us for a long time to come." Hefner’s daughter Christie recently resigned as Chairman and CEO of Playboy Enterprises and this isn’t exactly a fertile era for magazines in general. "All I can say is that the magazine will be there as long as Hef is there… It's his life blood. What happens after that, I don't know."

{Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist, Rebel screens at the Seattle International Film Festival tonight, Wednesday, June 9 at 9:30pm at the Egyptian Theater.}

Imaginary Interview: SIFF

ChrisB — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 14:07:29 +0000

If you've been to TIG any time over the past twenty days or so, you've noticed that the Seattle International Film Festival is one of our favorite events. Some 400+ short and feature films will have been screened by the time the whole thing wraps up on Sunday by giving out the Golden Space Needle Awards that morning and closing it out with a screening of the Bill Murray/Robert Duvall film Get Low and a party.

To get some more insight into the festival, we posed some questions via e-mail to SIFF's wonderful and extremely knowledgable Programming Director, Beth Barrett. Here's what she had to say.

What particular movies are you most excited for?

I can't wait to see THE TOPP TWINS: UNTOUCHABLE GIRLS - a great mix of music, camp, politics, folk songs and yodeling! They truly are New Zealand's pride... I'm also very curious about UTOPIA IN FOUR MOVEMENTS - it is a "live" documentary, created by Sam Green and Dave Cerf with input from the audience. I love the mix of established documentary footage with the idea of spontaneity.

Are there any favorite movies that you hope people see, beyond the obvious favorites?

I would love for people to come see HUGH HEFNER: PLAYBOY, ACTIVIST AND REBEL - this biopic really took my by surprise, not really knowing much about Hugh Hefner except the obvious "Tales of the Mansion"... through a lot of documentary footage and interviews, I discovered that I actually really didn't know ANYTHING about him, and the progressive nature of his work.

If I'm not mistaken, SIFF is the largest film festival in the US, both in terms of filmgoers and number of films screened (and if I'm wrong, it's likely pretty close). What is it about Seattle that makes it such a great city for film and is able to sustain and support the festival?

The audiences of Seattle are really adventurous and willing to take chances with film. We have a great level of film knowledge as a community, but even more than that, Seattle-ites are naturally curious about the world around us, and sincerely

Can you talk briefly about how films are chosen for SIFF? Is there a specific process for deciding which films make the cut and which don't?

Programming is an incredibly subjective process, and reflects the interests and thoughts of our 15 person programming team. We watch over 4000 films to arrive at the 405 that we will be screening this year. We discuss the films as a team, and what films we think will work best in the Festival. We have a number of programs, and really strive to have a wide variety of genre and styles within them.

In what ways has SIFF grown from when you first started working with the festival?

I started in 2003, and in the last 7 years, we have become a fully year-round organization, of which SIFF is the largest and most well known program. Our footprint has increased both in numbers of screenings, and venues both in and out of Seattle. Opening SIFF Cinema really allows us to concentrate on bringing the best film to Seattle year-round, and be more adventurous in our programming choices.

Last year, the Best Picture winner screened at SIFF (The Hurt Locker), how do you plan on topping it this year?

Full sweep. TOPP TWINS in 2010.

Who is responsible for disciplining people who reveal what was screened during the Secret Festival? Has it ever happened and what is the punishment, somewhere between politely asking not to reveal the names of any more movies and being put to death?

I've been sworn to secrecy about our methods....

How did you become involved with the festival?

I was a film-goer for many years, and then a volunteer, and then in 2004, became the Programming Manager. I came from the Publications world, and have a soft spot for the SIFF Catalog.

Last question. What would you say to someone who has never been to SIFF about what they could expect?

Expect something un-expected... Going to SIFF is different than going to the mulitiplex, since you will be surrounded by people who are very knowledgeable about the films, and often even more esoteric knowledge.... You should listen to the people in line and in the theatres and take a chance on a film you have never heard of, and stay for the Q&A's - directors often say something you aren't fully ready for.

To get some more insight into the festival, we posed some questions via e-mail to SIFF's wonderful and extremely knowledgable Programming Director, Beth Barrett. Here's what she had to say.

Deep SIFF: Wheedle's Groove

ChrisB — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 08:23:06 +0000

You could probably be forgiven if the first time you thought of Seattle as having a vibrant music scene was when MTV first aired "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Thanks to an engrossing new documentary from first time feature director Jennifer Maas called Wheedle's Groove that just played at the Seattle International Film Festival, you learn an awful lot about the thriving soul and funk scene from Seattle in the 1960s and '70s. While few of the artists are remembered today and fewer broke out of this particular scene, it was thriving because there were a lot of clubs booking these bands and they were playing several nights and week to large crowds.

The Wheedle's Groove project was first a compilation album from local buried treasure-finders Light in the Attic Records that they put out in 2004, featuring bands like Cold, Bold and Together, A Black On White Affair and Ron Buford. They aren't household names today, but the compilation has sparked a renaissance of interest in this time and it has spawned a supergroup of sorts from this era who play and record as Wheedle's Groove and released an album of new music in 2009 called Kearney Barton. When I interviewed director Maas at SIFF, she told me how the idea for this documentary came about. "I was doing a documentary, I was pretty new to making documentaries but I made a lot of short things, I decided I was going to find out how a music scene works behind the scenes. I started interviewing people like John Richards and Jason (Hughes) from Sonic Boom, different record labels. I was going to interview some of the Three Imaginary Girls, although I don't know that I did. I think I planned that interview but I don't think it ended up happening." It changed, she said, when "I ended up interviewing Matt Sullivan at Light in the Attic. They were just about to put out this compilation of soul music from the 60s and 70s in Seattle called Wheedle's Groove. I instantly decided that was the movie I needed to make instead of the one I had been making. There was a record release party (at Chop Suey) and I showed up there with a bunch of cameras and then here we are, five years later." It should be noted that she and Sullivan also married in that time.

Maas said she felt fortunate to have learned of the project when she did because it make tracking down people to participate much less difficult. "I was lucky enough that I discovered the project just as the compilation was about to come out. Matt and Light in the Attic and Supreme (a record collector and DJ featured in the film who is a treasure of knowledge from the era) did all of the hard work. I think it took them two years to get everyone on board. When I was on board, everyone already loved them and trusted them and were excited about the project. It wasn't that hard." She added that "Kenny G and Quincy Jones were a lot more difficult. Some of the grunge-era folks weren't super-easy but most people were happy to have been involved."

Success, or at least in the sense of "making it big," became elusive for a lot of musicians of this era. It is a common theme that runs through the movie. As Maas told me, "I think the sad truth is that most people just don't get to make it. I think there is some sadness and bitterness there and I think if you talk to a lot of people, they'll tell you that not making it is failure." She added that "I don't think 'not making it' is failure". One example she cites is Robbie Hill, the drummer and bandleader for Robbie Hill's Family Affair. He's "a janitor at Seattle Central Community College and I'm sure he'd like to play music more, but I think he is good at what he does. He's been employee of the year multiple times and people give him a high five as he walks down the hall. He loves what he does and has a great life. I don't think there's a lot of sadness there." Hill is also the drummer for the supergroup that came from musicians of this era who still play on occasion together. "There is a drum break he plays and I've had grown men in the audience squeal when they saw him play that," Maas also said of him.

Part of what made it more difficult for Seattle musicians from this era to break through was there wasn't an infrastructure to support a nationally-known scene. As Maas told me, "there wasn't a collective understanding of the industry here. Not very many musicians had managers and there wasn't anyone here saying 'this is what you need to do.' They pounded the pavement and tried to make the money here and often they'd go to LA. That's the story we saw over and over again where they'd journey to LA to try to make it and then they'd stay there for a while, but usually it didn't happen... They could have used a little more guidance." She added that there "wasn't a Motown here" and wouldn't be anything comparable until Seattle became synonymous with grunge in the early 1990s.

Most musicians from this era were able to work as musicians and didn't need to keep day jobs. In one particular scene from the movie, Robbie Hill talks of telling his band they could make a living from playing music and they all took a leap of faith and did quit their jobs. It worked well for several years where they were able to live on what they made from playing shows nightly.

It's not lost that the one musician from this era to become a star musician was Kenny Gorelick, a then-young saxophone player in Cold, Bold and Together who, of course, is now better known as Kenny G. "It's a bit of a reward a few minutes into the film" Maas said. He also comes across as very likable and surprisingly cool. Maas told me, "he was really great to work with and was funny and self-effacing. I flew down to Houston to interview him before a show and he stopped his soundcheck because he wasn't done reminiscing with us. I think people are surprised by that and it's one of the bonuses in the film that it shows him in a different light." Explaining further, she said, "He's certainly villified by those of us who don't connect to his music. The interesting thing to me about his audience is that he has a very large following of older black women who were listening to the same (type of) music that is in Wheedle's Groove and that was what they transitioned into. One person I interviewed in the film really liked Kenny G and I asked her to explain it to someone who isn't as familiar and she said 'that is the music we were making babies to.' I didn't get to stay for his show but when you saw the crowd lining up, it was these really cool black women in their fifties and sixties. There's a very direct lineage between the Wheedle's Groove music and the music Kenny G was playing in the early '80s."

The documentary continues to play at film festivals and Maas said she hoped to partner with different local community groups across the country to show the film. "The dream is to have a small version of the supergroup that has come out of this movie tour with the film. They are really great and they can still play and it would be amazing to have them tour with this film. It's a pretty expensive prospect, but that would be awesome," she said. More modestly, she added "I think we're going to have a theatrical run." Meanwhile, the Wheedle's Groove band continues to play shows locally, including playing a party for EMP members later this week and a free, lunch time concert at Harbor Steps on Friday, June 18 at noon. They continue to record, as well. Kearney Barton, which came out last year, Maas said "that was all new music that sounded like old music. It's really good." A favorite for her is "'Jesus Christ Pose,' which is a Soundgarden song that Pat Wright redid as a gospel song. She reinterpreted it. It's sort of about rock stars standing up in a Jesus Christ pose acting persecuted on stage, which was probably a '90s thing to do, I don't see it much anymore, and Pat Wright turned it into a song about hypocrisy in the church and she's a pastor. That was really, really amazing." She then said "There also might be one or two more of the Wheedle's Groove compilations, as well," and added "there's still a lot of music that's not out."

Deep SIFF: The Dry Land

ChrisB — Mon, 31 May 2010 00:31:48 +0000

For well over a century and going soon into two, people have accepted the common phrase "war is hell" as a universal truth. While likely true, we don't often talk about what affect war has on people individually once a war is over. That is the central issue surrounding Ryan Piers Williams' thrilling, post-war character study The Dry Land, which just played at the Seattle International Film Festival this past weekend.

Ryan O'Nan stars as James, a soldier returning home to his small Texas town after serving in Iraq. The war changed him and he now suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Coming back home, he is unprepared to deal with daily issues and is constantly on edge. He certainly doesn't mean to be abusive towards his lovely and loving wife Sara (played by America Ferrera) or snap and his friends and coworkers who don't understand the psychological torment he's dealing with. At best, they can be sympathetic, but not empathetic. The director, Williams, said in a roundtable discussion with myself and a few other local film writers said about his film's protagonist, "he needed much more than people saying 'thank you for your service'. He needs people to actively try to understand his situation and offer him the support that he needs."

Williams says he was inspired to make this film because "I started reading newspaper articles about this about five years. The first time I heard about PTSD, I was completely blown away. I knew people came back from war and were affected by it and I heard different stories about that. One in particular was about this guy who served his country honorably who was a hero but when he came back, his whole life fell apart. He was divorced within a couple of weeks of getting married; it just seemed the ultimate tragedy is that this man served his country and came home and found no support, he couldn't find the resources to treat what he was going through." He added he then "started reading more articles and being exposed to more people that were over there and there was more and more information. There was this huge issue that no one was talking about. Even five years later, people are more aware but still not that aware." When the Iraq and Afghanistan wars wind down and more and more troops come home, this issue will become more and more prevalent.

The filmmaker and actors said they made the film as a means of opening dialogue on a subject that affects thousands of families. The first step, Ferrera said she thinks "is removing the stigma of these soldiers coming home and asking for help. I think it needs to be a conversation and clearly it hasn't worked in the past to pretend it isn't there." After screening the film for military audiences, Williams thought "people left thinking they could talk about the issues better or had more knowledge of the issues and knew where they could go. That's really what I think this film is all about. The biggest reward for us is to see that people are talking and asking hard questions."

The film is the result of years of meticulous research. Williams said, "I spent two years researching before I knew that I had an idea and I spent a year and a half after that writing the story and sending it out to soldiers and family members who have similar experiences to get their stories and their feedback. Their notes really shaped the story in a lot of ways. There were things that I had in the first draft that weren't accurate and they'd call me out on it, so I took it out. I really relied heavily on hearing the stories of people who had similar situations." He goes on to say that he felt fortunate that the military was cooperative. "The army came out and supported us and were an amazing help. Basically, what they said was that they would give us whatever we needed, but the only thing is that it can't cost taxpayers any money. "We can provide you with certain resources and we can let you shoot in different facilities." Basically, they said "you tell us what you need and we'll do what we can to get it to you." One of the things we wanted to do was that we wanted each of the actors to talk to people that had been in Iraq and talk to people dealing with PTSD. I wanted America and Melissa (Leo, who plays James' frail and dying mother) to speak with wives of soldiers, not just of the current war but in Melissa's case, Vietnam wives."

A lot of attention was paid to small details, as America Ferrera said "in terms of the soldiers, one thing that Ryan wanted was for them to feel like it was true to their experience. Some of the soldiers commented on the simplest things, like having the patches in the right place or have them call what they would call each other. They were telling us that they couldn't buy any film that didn't get the small details right." Ryan O'Nan added "These guys watch all movies related to their experience and they just want their story to be told accurately. More than anything, they want it to be authentic and that they can share it with the people around them. Right before I left for Texas to film this movie, I sat down with one soldier for two and a half to three hours and recorded his story. He opened up to me in ways that he probably hadn't opened up to anyone (like he did to me) about his fears because he felt it probably had the potential to be used in a way to help his friends and help himself."

Williams said he felt the pressure from military people to tell their story accurately. "I remember when I was still researching and I went to Walter Reed and talked to some soldiers in the hospital and they said we better get it right and if we didn't, they didn't want to see it." He also remarked that "it really becomes about how you represent the character's journey that he's going through with PTSD and how do you represent the family members accurately in relation to the experience. There was a lot of pressure (to get it right). I feel very happy to say that we showed it to a lot of soldiers and they had amazing reactions to it."

After its final screening at SIFF, the filmmakers and stars plan on continuing to show it to military audiences as well as to crowds in other film festivals before opening in New York, Los Angeles and Dallas on July 30 and in a handful of other cities (including Seattle) a week later. Williams said "the biggest reward for us is to see that people are talking and asking hard questions." He said he was encouraged by a screening just two days before its first SIFF screening. "We screened the movie in Boise, ID on Thursday and there were two psychologists from the VA and the discussion was unbelievable. The audience probably asked the VA people more questions than they asked us and that's a good sign in my book," he said.

Ultimately, though, he doesn't see this as a war film because the implications can be universal and aren't exclusive to military families. He said "at the end of the day, I truly feel like it's a coming home story and people can relate to it, whether they have been in the military or not, because it's about that fracture that can happen when someone goes off to an experience like that and everyone they've left behind changes."

SIFF photo by Kathy Horsfall.

{The Dry Land screens once more at SIFF, on Monday, May 31 - Memorial Day - at 1:30pm at the Harvard Exit.}

Deep SIFF: A Little Help

ChrisB — Sun, 30 May 2010 07:30:50 +0000

Laura Pehlke has a life that looks good on paper in A Little Help, an engrossing dramedy from director Michael J. Weithorn that just made its world premiere at the Seattle Film Festival recently.

Jenna Fischer is Laura, a dental hygenist whose marriage isn't going well. She's married to Bob (Chris O'Donnell), a real estate agent who is mostly concerned with his next big acquisition. The marriage isn't happy, marred by his infidelity and her drinking. They have a twelve year old son and a home in suburban Long Island. They made the choices one expects to make to get to their lot in life. She married the good-looking guy who got a well-paying job. It's the life one could expect from a suburbanite: upper middle class, children, nice home, close to her family. She was comfortable, but not happy.

Her life was thrown off-track when her husband suddenly dies from a heart defect.

After that, a handful of crucial choices fell into Laura's lap, mostly beyond her control. Her family insists on enrolling her son in a private school neither she nor her son wants and on pursuing a wrongful death lawsuit against the emergency room doctor that misdiagnosed her late husband. Her son, when pressed why his father died, was desperate for approval and told his new classmates he was a heroic firefighter who died saving people on 9/11.

That description may make the film sound like a made-for-Lifetime melodrama, but what makes the film compelling is the authenticity of this character-driven film. The film is centered around Laura but the characters in her family are equally realized and, aside from a sleazy lawyer character, no one seems inauthentic.

Weithorn wrote and directed the film. He said in a roundtable discussion with a handful of Seattle film writers that the Laura character was "based on one woman, but mostly an amalgam, sort of as a woman who had skated by on her good looks. The choices she made that seemed easy and effortless are now coming home to roost." He added that "life isn't as easy anymore. As I was writing this, I knew a woman who was sort of going through something like this and I was heartbroken. It was like she had the rug pulled out from her and didn't know why. I added the particulars to it."

In the audience Q&A after its first screening at SIFF, Weithorn said that several years ago, there was a possibility of making the film with Drew Barrymore in the Laura part, which fortunately never came to fruition, even if it would have meant the film would have been made sooner and with a bigger budget. Having seen the film, it's difficult to imagine anyone other than Jenna Fischer playing the part. She's very pretty but still looks approachable, unlike an actress like Sienna Miller or Scarlett Johansson, whose beauty is immediately intimidating. Here she still looks gorgeous but also exhausted, like she's had too many cans of Budweiser and nights crying.

Fischer said she was drawn to the part because it was "a movie with a female protagonist that wasn't a romantic comedy, it wasn't a woman looking for love, but a woman struggling with life. She was trying to be an independent person but at the same time be a great mom, she's having to grow up unexpectedly." She didn't see much of her self in that part, though, telling me when I asked if anything from the character was drawn from her own life "it really was this story that Michael wanted to tell and it was based on a woman he knew, so I just asked him a lot of questions about this woman. It's not her story but she had a lot of these characteristics of Laura and he built the story around her. There was nothing where I pitched something that was autobiographical."

She draws distinctions between the Laura character, the character she is best known for (Pam Beesly on the hit TV show "The Office") and her own personality. "I'm much feistier than Pam, the woman everyone knows me as. I'm not as explosive as Laura, but I had my twenties, my crazy outbursts and I am an actress and we are known to be dramatic," she said.

If Jenna Fischer was hesitant to draw parallels to her character, one who wasn't was her co-star Rob Benedict, who played her brother-in-law Paul and who, despite marrying Laura's sister, always harbored a romantic interest in Laura. He said "one of the things that was really cool for me was that I really identified with this guy right away. I have a music background, I play the guitar and I'm a dad. While I'm in a good marriage, I related to that idea that you have these desires that are held in check because of the boundaries and the reality that is your life." He also said that his character was "a guy who always got by with his humor, but he never scored with the ladies, so he used his sense of humor as his defense."

That underscores an important point: this film is also very funny. The immediate comic relief is played by Ron Liebman, who is playing Laura's father. He's a former journalist who is constantly bragging about being "there" at important events. The most obvious humor scene was when he claimed to have been the first person in the ring after Cassius Clay beat Sonny Liston in 1964. That scene is played for laughs but throughout the rest of the film, the humor is more subtle and implied. Benedict said of this "these are people you know and the humor was something where you look back on it and think 'that was really funny' even though my character wasn't going for the laugh. That was all rooted in reality, so that's why this was a movie I liked."

A Little Help is a small-budget film that is currently seeking distribution, so it's unknown when it could be playing beyond the film festival circuit right now. When asked about the film's prospects, Weithorn was hoping to work out a deal to get it soon in the near future but added "I don't think this is a movie like Little Miss Sunshine, where it'll be an 'indie' that breaks out. I'm not criticizing that movie, but it had a more deliberate, big climactic finish and uplift and everyone is happy. I deliberately did not want that for this movie."

(SIFF cast photo by April Brimer.)

Kate Nash: Bricks are Heavy

ChrisB — Mon, 10 May 2010 12:35:45 +0000

The first time I saw British pop star Kate Nash was almost two years to the day prior to the second time I saw her play. It was a sold out show at the Showbox at the Market and the buzz was beginning to make its way to the US after her debut album Made of Bricks hit number one in the UK. Her songs were perfectly catchy bedroom pop numbers accentuated by Nash’s witty lyrics and made with a piano and little else. She had barely gotten out of her teenage years but even then she had a knack with clever wordplay complimented with plenty of memorable hooks. Nash’s music was often like reading your most clever friend’s diary with a melody behind it. Listening to Made of Bricks or seeing her play those songs live, the adjectives that first came to mind would likely be “sweet” or “lovely” or “cute”.

After returning with an excellent and much more realized sophomore album, My Best Friend is You, a catchy-as-hell lead single that pays homage to 1960s girl groups and a US tour whose opening act is called “Supercute”, it would be easy to use those same adjectives to describe Nash in 2010. I interviewed Nash on the morning of her stop in Seattle last week and after I got off the phone with her, like after the first show I saw of hers, I thought she was perfectly lovely. She seemed quite humble after every compliment I gave her (which was often because I do think My Best Friend is You is a brilliant album) and was ready to write exactly that. I spent a lot of the time between our phone interview and when she took the stage at Neumos that same night (around twelve hours) mapping out exactly how I was going to write this article in my head.

By the time she ended her set around midnight at Neumos and I was leaving the club with my friend Nikki, we were both at a loss for words. The Kate Nash we saw that night was hardly sweet or cute or lovely, she was every bit of a badass.

Nash began her set about 30 minutes later than the time posted on the schedules on the wall. When she came out, she was quite angry with the crowd because someone in the audience had thrown a condom at the teenage avant-pop band Supercute, who opened the show. I hadn’t seen it and I thought I heard that a drink was thrown but didn’t see anything like that. Regardless, Seattle is like any other city in that there is no dearth of assholes, especially in large crowds, and the pop star everyone came to see was quite pissed off. Nash could be an unlikely heir to the Riot Grrrl movement from the 1990s but seeing her onstage, it’s obvious that today she has more in common with Bikini Kill or Huggy Bear than she does with most other pop stars. Bikini Kill’s frontwoman Kathleen Hanna famously scrawled “SLUT” across her midriff or L7’s Donita Sparks was known for throwing her tampons into the crowd from stage at the Reading Festival in 1992. Nash had a not dissimilar way of provoking the crowd. When she sat down at her keyboard for the piano pop songs, there was a black sheet over the front that had a message made out in masking tape. After the show I was able to find out that the message said “A cunt is a useful thing.”

The Riot Grrrl influences do come across more in her second album, My Best Friend is You, with the most obvious example being “Mansion Song”. She begins with a spoken word monologue of a supposedly-empowered female hipster who treats sex as a nonchalant formality and conversely a sense of power. It’s the most provoking moment on the record. Of the song, Nash told me, “It’s just like aggression and an expression of how I felt. It’s a reflection on groupie culture and it’s a shame of how it’s a waste of that person because they’re disrespected by everyone around them, even by the men who sleep with them.” She goes on to say in our interview that when writing the song, she thought that “a lot of these girls use sex as a means to just get in the door or as a way to make themselves feel better by sleeping around, but it’s almost like drinking when you’re depressed; you really think you need a drink but end up crying at the end of the night because alcohol is a depressant. Sex can be like that if you don’t already feel good about yourself and you’ll end up sleeping with the kind of people who won’t respect you.”

That is a theme that runs through a lot of My Best Friend is You, but Nash isn’t always so overt. On the first single “Do-Wah-Doo,” she sings disapprovingly of a young woman not unlike the one she is addressing in first person in “Mansion Song.” “Everyone thinks that girl is a lady, I don’t, I think that girl is shady” is how one of the verses goes. In the chorus she throws her hands up in the air and says “I’ll just read a book instead.” She told me it “was supposed to be a light-hearted pop song. It was inspired by the 1960s and the girl-group era. A lot of the chords are very repetitive and the song is very simple. It’s meant to be quite catchy and Wall of Sound-like but have a teen drama, a love drama, running through it.” Simple, maybe, but it’s far more subversive than that.

Nash’s resume boasts of being discovered on MySpace, and that occurred mostly when another British pop star with biting lyrics and an unspoken demeanor, Lily Allen, put Nash amongst her top friends. That’s about where the similarities end, though. Nash was hardly riding Allen’s coattails and established her own identity and connected with fans on a level that took her debut album to the top of the UK charts and sold some 600,000 copies worldwide. Moreover, Nash’s lyrics are more confessional than Allen’s are and their approaches to songwriting and production are dissimilar. The change from her onstage persona hardly seems calculated and more of the result of maturing and finding a sense of responsibility as an artist (she’s still only twenty two years old). While the discovery of four-letter words isn't a new phenomenon (my copy of Made of Bricks has a parental advisory warning and contains "Shit Song" and "Dickhead"), being overtly political is. She said that “I’ve changed and I’ve grown up a bit, just like you hoped you would do every three or four years or so. For me, it keeps the show interesting and it’s a different way of expressing myself on stage.” Moreover, what record label would tell a number one selling artist that the way to continue to sell records would be to trade in shock value (which she doesn’t actually do, provocative yes) when your nice-girl demeanor was doing quite well, thankyouverymuch?

The growth of Kate Nash as an artist and as an outspoken figure is remarkable. She may not have another number one album again, but you get the sense that that is the least of her concerns. She also told me that she spends time working “with a charity called The Wish Centre, which is an organization for women are victims of domestic violence and young girls and boys who are affected by it.” Spin summed up this transformation nicely when they reviewed her tour kick-off in Toronto: “here’s Kathleen Hanna for Generation Y.”

Exene Cervenka's record store tour

ChrisB — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 15:15:41 +0000

Record stores have, like nearly every business, not fared particularly well in the economic climate of the past few years. In fact, they have likely had a much more difficult time staying solvent as the move towards more people getting their music online than at retail stores. At the beginning of this year, the first two albums to hit number one on the Billboard 200 chart this year (Ke$ha’s Animal and Vampire Weekend’s Contra) were the first two albums in history to top the charts with more than 50% digital sales. The lower prices, huge catalogs and fast delivery methods have made iTunes, emusic and Amazon the often first place for people to go to purchase music (and that’s saying nothing of what is obtained via illegal downloading) and has made it that much harder for record stores to stay in business.

One artist who is doing what she can to help record stores is Exene Cervenka. Best known for being the badass frontwoman for punk band X and the alt-country band The Knitters, she has been one of the most prolific and multi-faceted artists over the past thirty-plus years. Not just a musician, but she’s also a writer, poet and visual artist. My favorite quote about Cervenka came from her X and Knitters bandmate John Doe (which I found in Maria Raha’s great book Cinderella’s Big Score), who said “she was such a badass! I pretended to be but Exene was the real thing. She had the ax to grind…the unusual wiring that made it possible for her to throw a drink in somebody’s face and still be right.” She most recently released a gorgeous solo record called Somewhere Gone last autumn. She is currently on a tour, playing in-store shows at record stores on the west coast that will include appearances at three Seattle-area record stores: Easy Street Records (Queen Anne) on Friday, April 16 and on Saturday, April 17, the actual Record Store Day, she’ll be at Tyrannosaurus Records in Renton and Damaged Goods in Belltown.

I asked Cervenka during a phone interview last week why she was doing this tour of exclusively record stores and she said bluntly, “I want to help keep them open,” and then adding “and I want to play places that are all ages, where we aren’t playing at 11:00 at night that is full of beer and whiskey, where young girls can come, or young boys who want to see someone who has been around.” She also said, “I want to play my new songs and I want people to hear my new songs and not have to worry about getting a babysitter and drinks and parking and can’t go because it’s at 11:00 at night. It’s hard for people to go out and spend that kind of money, so I wanted to make it easy for them. I win, the fans and the audience win and the record stores win.”

Her album she’s touring to promote is Somewhere Gone (Bloodshot), her first solo album since 1996. It’s a beautifully-made album with personal, sincere lyrics that compliment the folk arrangements. Contrasting with her previous work, she told me “these songs are different. They’re all like emotional landscapes and they’re all love songs. They’re kind of poppy and folky and catchy.”

She’s had a remarkable career for over thirty years, not just with numerous musical projects like X, The Knitters, Auntie Christ and her solo work, but also as a writer and artist. My favorite book of hers is Adulterers Anonymous, a collection of poetry with No-Wave artist Lydia Lunch where they annotate each other’s words. She said of the comparison between making visual art and music, “The art, the collages that I make is great because your mind is kind of free and kind of Zen-like. You don’t really think about anything other than what those colors look like together but when you write a song you’re going deep into your emotions. It’s a completely different process. It depends on your mood. Some days you don’t want to think about any of that stuff so you make art, other times you feel like you really want to get your emotions out and something hops into your mind that you want to work on, so you write a song.” She added “right now, it’s all music, all the time.”

This all music, all the time is keeping her busy. Later in the spring she’ll play some shows with X and The Knitters before finishing up her next solo album. She told me “I started recording and when I get home from this tour and I’ll start recording again and hope to finish up in June. I’ve already figured what the songs are going to be and they’re all written. I have a fantastic producer, fantastic studio and fantastic people to play on it. I can’t wait.” She understandably didn’t want to talk about who she would be collaborating with.

Part of what makes her energy, output and longevity as an artist so impressive was the admission recently that she has multiple sclerosis. She released a statement, visible on her website, saying in part “many people remain strong and continue to live their lives as productively as they had before an MS diagnosis. I plan to be one of those people.” When I heard her on KCRW’s “Morning Becomes Eclectic” program a few months ago, host Jason Bentley asked how she was feeling and said “fine”. With her prolific output as an artist and upbeat, friendly manner when I talked to her on the phone, it’s difficult to see how she could be anything but.

Right now, she is on this tour of record stores and said she’s having a great time. She said the in-stores “were exactly what I had envisioned when I thought about doing this. There were kids there and all kinds of people there and they were buying records and things to have signed. There have been a lot of people coming out and the record stores were very happy.” She added, “There is pressure when you go on the road because you have a band and you have to pay everybody and make sure everybody’s rooms are right and all that and you have to keep everyone happy. Everyone is playing for not very much money and you don’t know if people are going to come out or not. They don’t have any money either, but with these in-stores, there’s no pressure. It’s me with my guitar and my best friend and we’re driving around the country and we’re having a great time. No one has to have any pressure if no one shows up; that’s just not even an issue, it’s fantastic.”

One point she wanted to convey was that she hoped everyone would support the record stores as much as they could. She told me “this is one thing I’d like to say is that when people come out to my shows, I don’t care if people buy my record or not, if they do it’s fantastic and if they don’t, it’s fine, but please buy something from the store. There are all kinds of great things in the record stores and I just want people to patronize the stores while they’re at the shows, even if it’s just to get a button or something. Just help the store out.”

{Photo by Ali Smith.}

{Exene Cervenka plays at Easy Street Records (Queen Anne) on Friday, April 16 at 6pm, at Tyrannosaurus Records (Renton) on Saturday, April 17 at 2pm and at Damaged Goods on Saturday, April 17 at 5pm, all free and all ages.}

King Khan and the Shrines' "psychedelic, erotic gospel"

ChrisB — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 14:19:11 +0000

When James Brown passed away a few Christmases ago, the title of “Hardest Working Man in Showbiz” had to have been passed to someone, if at all. For my money, the obvious choice would be the Montreal-born musician Arish Khan, better known as King Khan.

Khan has been one of the most prolific musicians over the past several years, constantly touring and working and recording with his projects King Khan and the Shrines and King Khan and BBQ Show, most notably. The rock band King Khan and BBQ Show is a collaboration with Mark Sultan, a musician from Montreal who has worked with Khan since their days in a mid-to-late 1990s band called The Spaceshits. There’s also Almighty Defenders, who released an album last fall on Vice Records, which was a gospel-inspired project between Khan, Sultan and Atlanta punk band The Black Lips, who found rock asylum at Khan’s Berlin home after an ill-advised tour of India where the band fled after learning the world’s largest democracy probably didn’t appreciate The Sex Pistols a generation before and still weren’t ready for their music. Khan is also planning on working with Wu-Tang Clan rapper GZA’s next album, when he can find the time.

Even more recently, King Khan and Pat Meteor, a friend in Montreal from the band The Demon’s Claw recorded a single called “The Fiery Tears of St. Laurent” that was released as a 7” on Sub Pop about three weeks ago. Khan told me in our phone interview that he and Meteor wanted to write a song about St. Laurent, who the river that surrounds Montreal was named for. To give a brief history lesson: St. Laurent was a third century French martyr who was burned at the stake for refusing to renounce Christianity.

My favorite project of Khan’s, though, is King Khan and the Shrines. It’s an eight-piece band that combines soul with the sloppiness and ethos of punk. Think for a moment of Iggy Pop and the Dap-Kings and you might come close to realizing what King Khan and the Shrines sound like. They’re currently touring the US with San Francisco punks The Fresh and Onlys, including a stop at Neumos on Tuesday. Khan joked in our phone interview that there’s seventeen people on this tour (eight others make up The Shrines), including both bands and laughed when he said “it is like a mob, or cult”.

Khan said of their sound, “I’m really inspired by a lot of raw, gospel stuff. I think what we do is a modern version of gospel. We’re kind of putting the ‘wild’ back in gospel. I like to call it psychedelic, erotic gospel.” He elaborated, “I think it’s kind of evolved into that. At the beginning you’re always searching for you are kind of searching for your sound and that might take a couple of albums, but I think when we put out the What Is!? album in 2007, we really honed in what we wanted to do. There’s a variety, but it’s mostly gospel and soul and R&B, but I also love punk rock and psychedelic rock. I think we have our own sound and I don’t think there’s been a band that sounded like us before.”

With both 2007’s What Is!? and 2008’s modestly-named The Supreme Genius of King Khan and the Shrines (both on Vice), the band has found a sound that has gelled and is consistent. Yet one thing that can’t be overlooked is the humor in the lyrics. “You don’t have to pay your bills; you just have to eat my welfare bread” Khan croons in the chorus of one particular song.

When I was doing research to prep for this interview, I ran across a quote from Khan on his Wikipedia bio that said “when you’re in your twenties, you can get away with urinating on the public; when you’re in your thirties and you’re a dad, it’s just gross.” I asked him about how that’s affected his music and songwriting and he said “I think what mostly affected my songwriting was having children, but that wasn’t recent. That was about 10 years ago when I first started the band. That helped me focus on making more soul music and more music about love and less about hateful, destructive things.”

Maybe I’m grasping at a metaphor, or just anxious to include this story, but early in our interview, Khan told me this story about the first night of this tour:

The first day of the tour, we were eating at this restaurant and outside of it we saw this dying rat on the sidewalk. It was gasping for its last breath of air. It looked like it had been poisoned. We were circled around it and were contemplating what to do with it. Should we put it out of its misery? And then the guitar player for The Fresh and Onlys, Wymond (Miles) bent down on his knees and put his hands above the rat and started doing this chant. He was whispering, maybe a little prayer. He was doing it for about five minutes. This rat was really dying; he looked like a fish out of water, just gasping for air. And then we all stepped back and we watching him. After about three or four more minutes, the rat just leapt and ran away. It was amazing and beautiful. I think it’s a nice intro for this tour. Most of us were just thinking “let’s just bash his head in” but then thank god we had him to heal it!

He joked “I’m hoping by the end of the tour there is a trail of rats following us with dying animals, bringing offerings” and added “I need to practice my flute playing!” It's certainly preferably to the last King Khan and BBQ Show tour, where Khan and their tour manager were arrested in Kentucky for possession of mushrooms and several dates had to be canceled last November.

The live King Khan and the Shrines show is said to be a wild experience with a lot of different costume changes with the band’s signature garage-influenced soul. There won’t be any public urination or trails of rats at Neumos on Tuesday (thank God!), but it should be a unique experience nonetheless. Who else would put both “erotic” and “gospel” in the same sentence? And what could be more rock and roll?

{King Khan and the Shrines play at Neumos on Tuesday, April 13 with The Fresh and Onlys and Unnatural Helpers; 21+, $15 adv.}

Imelda May: No Turning Back

ChrisB — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 11:23:37 +0000

If you saw the Grammy Awards last January, you may have been left with several questions, most of which involve Lady Gaga. What interested me, though, was who was the bombshell singer performing with Jeff Beck during the tribute to Les Paul? In an evening full of the biggest performers in music taking the stage, she may have been the least-known artist to sing on stage, but gave a captivating and dynamic performance.

The answer to that is query is Imelda May, a thirty-five year old rockabilly singer from Dublin. She released her first album in the US, Love Tattoo, last September and just finished her first tour of the US, opening for British jazz/pop sensation Jamie Cullum. She’s arguably the most exciting female rockabilly singer since Wanda Jackson.

May told me in an interview just a few hours before the Seattle show on her tour with Cullum at the Moore Theater that she always grew up with “a very musical family.” One incident she said with a laugh was “when I was a teenager, I took a tape from my brother’s room; I borrowed it, never to be brought back again, and it had Buddy Holly on it. That blew my mind. I never heard anything like that before.” She then learned about Elvis Presley, Billie Holliday and similar, legendary artists, which ultimately pointed her towards rockabilly and blues.

It almost seemed accidental that May’s musical palette includes so many older artists. She said that she discovered a lot of music because the records were inexpensive. “I figured out when I started buying records that this one shop was selling them and I went in there and bought a bunch of R&B records for just a couple of pounds. There were ones that said Chess or Ace on them and I really loved those. I discovered all of these fantastic people just because I was buying their records cheaply.”

During her set at the Moore she joked that “I was too young to be in bars at 16, but I sure learned a lot back then.” It was in 2008, though, that her career started to take off with an appearance on the popular and important British TV show “Later…with Jools Holland”. It also didn’t hurt any that Jeff Beck also found her voice captivating.

Her first album was actually called No Turning Back, which was released originally in 2005 under the name Imelda Clabby, but reissued in Europe last year. She said that in hindsight, she wasn’t happy with its quality originally and took the opportunity to rerecord it, saying “When I recorded it in a bedroom and it was late at night, so I was afraid to sing. We were recording at 2 in the morning and I thought 'oh god, we’re going to wake the whole neighborhood', so I never thought I sang as well as I could and the recording and the sound were just awful. When things started to take off, I thought ‘I’d really love to rerecord that.’ I went into the studio and quickly redid the vocals and put it back out. I felt really relieved where I could fix it. It’s a better sound and better quality.”

Love Tattoo, her sophomore album, is particularly strong. It’s full of catchy, rockabilly songs that mesh her sultry voice with, in particular, a throbbing (upright) bassline. The two singles have names sound retro from the 1950s: “Johnny Got a Boom Boom” and “Big, Bad Handsome Man”. The former is more upbeat while the latter is drawn out and quite seductive.

She told me she just finished its follow-up just before embarking on the tour with Cullum, saying “I finished recording the next album, just the night before heading out on this tour. I produced this next album like I produced Love Tattoo and it was taking up every hour of my day.” She said it’ll be available in Europe in September and likely in the US at the end of 2010 or early 2011.

Her album, Love Tattoo, found its way to the US after fans found her music on the internet, she said and thought there was enough demand to release it in the US. Combine that with her magnetic stage presence and she should be a legitimate star. When I interviewed her in her dressing room at the Moore, she couldn’t have been much taller than five feet, but on stage that night, she seemed at least a foot taller (and that wasn’t just high heels). The crowd at the show I saw loved every second of her performance, finishing with a lengthy standing ovation for a set that included a mixture of her original songs and classic covers, including a surprisingly faithful rockabilly cover of “Tainted Love”. What was especially impressive about the crowd’s reaction is that May and Jamie Cullum don’t typically share the same fan base.

The Grammy performance, though, was unquestionably her star turn and she thanks Jeff Beck and his persistence for making it happen. Producers of the show, she said, wanted to feature a star-studded tribute to Les Paul but Beck insisted on May singing “How High the Moon” with her husband and band’s guitarist Darrel Higham also playing guitar. She said it was all history “eventually, just a week before he won his argument and I got a call saying we’re playing at the Grammy Awards.”

What you may notice when you watch that performance is the use of a backing vocal track, which was deliberate and meant to pay tribute to Paul. She said, “. Les Paul was one of the inventors of the multitracking system, which we take for granted now. That’s why I laid down a lot of vocal tracks and then sang live at the Grammys. It’s the exact same way that (Paul’s wife and collaborator from as far back as the 1940s) Mary Ford did it to show off that technique.”

“It was absolutely surreal” she told me, but more in awe of getting the opportunity to perform with Beck at the Les Paul tribute than sharing a stage with the biggest pop stars of the moment. Still, it was clear from watching that performance that she belonged on that stage as much as anyone else. In a just and fair world, she’d be back again, repeatedly.

Little Boots' catchy pop, "stuck on repeat"

ChrisB — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 19:30:04 +0000

When I saw Little Boots perform last fall, it was the final stop on her brief US tour, at the Independent, a 500-person capacity club in San Francisco. The show, like every stop on that tour, was sold out, even more impressive that it would be almost six months before her excellent debut album Hands would land in US record stores. It was a very exciting set by a gifted performer that could very well become a big pop star in the United States and certainly worth the price of airfare and lodging.

Little Boots is Victoria Hekseth, a twenty-five year old pop ingénue from Blackpool, UK and has quickly become one of my favorite pop stars today, enough so that I would fly to San Francisco to see her perform a week and a half before another trip to the Bay Area for Kylie Minogue’s first ever US show and that I took the name for my pop music blog from one of her songs. Her songs are irresistably catchy and well-constructed and easy to get lodged in your brain for hours at a time.

Her music is straight-forward electro dance pop, with much emphasis on memorable hooks and choruses, or to borrow a line from my favorite Lady Gaga song, "glamorphonic, electronic, disco, baby". Hands was released in June of 2009 in the UK, where it charted as a top five album. It was released in the US just this Tuesday (March 2). The album is full of great, well-produced, -written and -polished pop songs, with the best songs (or at least my favorite) being the singles "New in Town" and "Stuck on Repeat."

Hekseth worked with some of pop’s most gifted producers on Hands, including RedOne (who might best be known for helming Lady Gaga’s "Bad Romance" and helping it get to number two on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart earlier this year), Joe Goddard from the dance pop band Hot Chip and Greg Kurstin, half of the LA pop duo The Bird and the Bee and producer of one of my very favorite records of 2009, Lily Allen’s It’s Not Me, It’s You. Of Kurstin, Hekseth told me in a phone interview, "I actually worked with Greg in my old band, Dead Disco, back in the day and he was one of the people who really, really encouraged me. It really gave me so much confidence because he said I was a really good songwriter."

"Stuck on Repeat" opens with the chorus and is one of those great pop songs that can be both about loving music and crushing on someone. It’s only personal if you assign it a personal value and that’s where its brilliance lies. "You’ve got me stuck on repeat and I can’t seem to break free; you’ve got me stuck on repeat and I can only move to the beat" she coos in the breathy chorus. Hekseth told me "it was one of the first songs I had written but it wasn’t written with me in mind, I just wanted to write a really good pop song." It was produced by Goddard and was written as she was leaving the indie dance pop band Dead Disco.

"New in Town" begins the album and it’s a deliriously addictive pop song. It has an irresistible confidence blended with a recession-era sensibility: "I don’t have a lot of money but we’ll be fine, I don’t have a penny but I’ll show you a good time" is part of the chorus. It has a futuristic beat that fits the harmonies and lyrics perfectly. It was co-written and produced by Kurstin. She told me it was "written when I first went to LA on my own. It was really cool and exciting but also really scary because I didn’t know anybody. I didn’t know what to do or where to go without a car, so it’s sort of about that mixture of excitement but also being a little bit afraid." Another line from a verse bears that out "so don’t rely on people you meet; ‘cause no one is safe in these streets."

At that show in San Francisco I saw in September, Hekseth made a joke on stage about how everyone in the crowd knew her songs, although her album wouldn’t be out until the following year. I couldn’t tell then if it was visible annoyance that internet file-sharing meant hundreds and hundreds of people had her music before it was legally available or relief that people were taking to her music. When I asked her about it in our interview, it was clearly the latter, saying it was "so cool and great" that her fans knew the music.

When Little Boots makes her way to the stage at Neumos on Saturday, it’ll be a stripped down version of the show British fans have seen, which incorporates a laser harp. Lasers have been a big part of her stage show, but US law prohibits them from being operated by just anyone and requires proper certification. Slightly disappointed, she said "this tour is going to be laser-free, unfortunately." You can take comfort, though, in knowing that next time you see Laser Pink Floyd at the Science Center, you’re in the capable hands of a professional.

What will almost certainly be part of the live show is a Tenori-On, a Japanese sequencer with an LED screen that produces a variety of beats. It’s become a staple of her live shows and might be the first thing you notice on the stage and the most curious. That isn’t the only unusual (or maybe "uncommon" is more appropriate) instrument she plays. The New York Times asked this morning in a review of her New York show earlier this week, "did you know that she also plays the stylophone? It’s the electronic instrument that made the fat, squelchy glissando in David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ and Kraftwerk’s ‘Pocket Calculator.’ It’s a tablet, about as big as a hardcover book, with a stylus attached." Little Boots is the glamorous pop star that can talk shop with gear nerds and Tape Op subscribers.

Saturday night’s show should be a dazzling affair watching an electrifying performer and one of the most promising stars in the pop landscape today. The show I saw in San Francisco was remarkable because there was a sense as everyone was filing out of the club that they just saw a genuine pop star in a small club, a modestly-kept secret that, in a just world, wouldn’t stay that way.

{Photo by Daniel Sannwald}

{Little Boots plays at Neumos on Saturday, March 6 with Class Actress and Dragonette.}

Her music is straight-forward electro dance pop, with much emphasis on memorable hooks and choruses, or to borrow a line from my favorite Lady Gaga song, "glamourphonic, electronic, disco, baby". Hands was released in June of 2009 in the UK, where it charted as a top five album. It was released in the US just this Tuesday (March 2). The album is full of great, well-produced, -written and -polished pop songs, with the best songs (or at least my favorite) being the singles "New in Town" and "Stuck on Repeat."

Imaginary Interview: Todd Barry talks about "Defriending Cancer"

ChrisB — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 17:02:41 +0000

“Defriending Cancer” is not just a good idea but an excellent comedy and music benefit coming up. The night is hosted by comedian Todd Barry and features some of his funniest colleagues, like Neil Hamburger, Eugene Mirman, Tig Notaro, Natasha Leggero and Tim Heidecker (of “Tim and Eric” fame). It also features music from James Mercer of The Shins and Isaac Brock of Modest Mouse. The event takes place Thursday, February 11 at the Moore and the money raised benefits the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Tickets can be obtained here.

The host, Todd Barry, is one of the funniest comedians I’ve ever seen perform. His rare intelligence and droll delivery always make for a hilarious time. He's also a great actor, appearing in films like the critics' favorite, The Wrestler. I spoke with him by phone about the event, what we can expect next Thursday night and about his experiences as a comedian opening for a loved rock band.

What are you looking forward to for this benefit?

I picked all of the comics, so I just want it to be one big, fun night to raise money for a good cause. That’s what I always want that in a show; I just want people to not feel like they’ve been ripped off when they leave. I’m really thrilled that everyone (booked) agreed to do it.

I’ve also done a few shows at the Moore before and it’s a really great old theater.

I’ve seen you perform a few times before and those shows mostly seem to be benefits that mixes music and comedy. There was one where you were in Tinkle with David Cross and Todd Benjamin that was at the Showbox and you were with the New Pornographers and then more recently was a benefit for 826 Seattle at Town Hall called "People Talking and Singing".

I have done a few benefits in Seattle. I like Seattle. It’s probably one of the cities I perform in the most.

Is there anything about Seattle that keeps you coming back?

I don’t know; I’ve done Bumbershoot and some other shows like the Sub Pop twentieth anniversary show at the Moore. I don’t know the crowds but are always good and they’re always really polite.

Was there someone who approached you about putting this together?

No, actually Megan (Jasper of Sub Pop) and I both lost people to leukemia, I lost my mother and she lost a good friend. We talked about it and thought it would be easy enough to organize, and it would be fun as well.

What was it about these particular comedians that made you want to book them?

I’ve been friends with a lot of comedians over the past twenty-two years and they’re friends of mine and they’re all really good. Also, each one is different from each other, so it’s a variety of styles. There’s something for everyone.

That’s one of the things I really like about this lineup: no one is really similar to the one before or after.

Nah, we have some extremes with some really good joke-writers and some more unusual acts. Take Neil Hamburger, there’s no one else like Neil Hamburger and Tim Heidecker has something really cool lined up. Natasha (Leggero) is great, actually everyone involved is really great.

How did you end up getting into comedy? Were you always funny?

I don’t know. I guess I always tried to be funny, but at some point I was watching comedians on TV and decided to give it a whirl. I didn’t know what I was doing, I was in my early twenties, but I just stuck to it for whatever reason. It’s like everything else, you just feel drawn to it and you give it a whirl and it worked out; it’s like any career.

The benefits that I’ve seen you perform at were with musical and comedic acts. I think you’ve also toured with bands like Yo La Tengo. Is that something you enjoy because it seems like the comedy and music crowds could be quite different?

It can be a rough thing, but I try to do it only when I think it’s going to be a good match and the crowds will be able to focus on both types of entertainment, if that makes sense.

I think this show is being billed as a comedy and music event and it’s in a theater, so I don’t think it’s going to be like it’s in a noisy club where people are going to be shitty.

I think (in this case) people will be really excited about the musical acts, so it should be fun.

Have any musical acts audiences been better or worse towards you?

Like I said, I’ve been pretty lucky in that I’ve picked people where I think I think it’s going to work out. When I open for a band, I usually have them introduce me so that they know I’m not someone who was thrown up randomly, just like it wasn’t that they grabbed a comedian and threw him up on stage. “He’s a friend of ours and listen to him.”

I remember seeing a video on YouTube where you read a hilarious letter from a Yo La Tengo fan who said that they’d give anyone who got their endorsement a chance.

Yeah, and people know with them they have comedy on their shows pretty often.

Is there anything else people should know about this benefit that we haven’t talked about yet?

I don’t think so. With comedy shows, as long as people know it’s happening, there’s not really a sales pitch I can give for it. If you know some of these people and you know these musicians, it kind of speaks for itself. The money goes to a good cause and it’s not too expensive. It goes to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

One of my very best friends is putting on another benefit for them two nights later at the Crocodile. It’ll be a good weekend for raising money to fight leukemia that weekend!

I hope she does well and I hope we both do well.

What else are you working on right now?

I’m just doing shows across the country right now. I don’t really have any acting roles coming up. I did do a show called “Delocated” that will be in Adult Swim on the Cartoon Network and that will be out sometime in the summer. I’m mostly just booking shows right now.

Ed note: We're reposting this to remind all you sweethearts the big comedy / music fest is TONIGHT! If you can't make it (there *are* other great shows tonight), make sure to check out the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society website to find out more about this worthy cause.

A tour of Seattle's new Hard Rock Cafe

ChrisB — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 03:19:04 +0000

On Wednesday, the Seattle Hard Rock Café opened its doors at First Avenue and Pike Street. Overall, I think it’s a very good thing for Seattle and Seattle music, but first let's talk about the Wikipedia/press release details.

The Hard Rock Café in Seattle will be one of more than 150 locations worldwide. In an economy where the unemployment rate has been hovering around 10%, this restaurant put somewhere around 150 employees through orientation. The space is two stories high and occupies about 14,000 square feet. Before the lobby of the Hard Rock was a lobby of the Hard Rock, it was a pawn shop; the second floor, where there is a bar and restaurant and music venue was previously an adult bookstore. While I’m not necessarily in favor of pushing pawn shops or porn stores out of the way to make room for a corporate chain of restaurants on principle (and one directly across the street from where another burger chain fizzled: Johnny Rockets), combined, I doubt either of those seedy businesses ever had payrolls approaching 150 people.

The roof of the space was converted to an outdoor patio with gas fires to keep warm. The view from there of Puget Sound is breathtakingly beautiful and with a bar and a capacity of around 80 people. I want to have my next birthday party there; even if it is outdoors and my birthday is in January.

To me, the memorabilia is both very impressive and the most underwhelming aspect of the tour that I and a handful of other media representatives experienced two days prior to its opening. Some of the items are stunning, such as guitars used by Eddie Vedder and Kurt Cobain or the topper on Courtney Love and Cobain’s wedding cake. Grunge was very well represented although I’m not convinced it’s a story that hasn't already been told so often it's familiar, but, moreover, does the Hard Rock have the credibility to tell that particular story after the Vegas hotel and casino altered one of Cobain’s guitars to censor an expletive?

You could learn a lot about the genre from the exhibits on display, as well as the audio tour where you can call on your cell phone to hear recorded details on items throughout the restaurant. We were told that it is the first location to offer that service, which I think is a good thing because I believe the stories behind each item are more interesting than the item itself.

I found the memorabilia less thrilling overall but am still enthusiastically bullish on the restaurant as a whole. Moreover, I asked a curator during our tour whether or not riot grrrl was represented here and it wasn’t. One photographer noted to me that also missing weren’t just influential riot grrrl bands like Sleater-Kinney and Bikini Kill, but other Northwest bands who were wildly successful more recently, like Modest Mouse and Death Cab for Cutie. Certainly, though, it doesn’t take a focus group or an advanced degree in marketing to tell you that Eddie Vedder’s guitar will sell more cheeseburgers than Carrie Brownstein’s would.

The curator did explain that his approach was to find acts that are either from Seattle or played here, so that may explain those omissions: Modest Mouse (Issaquah), Sleater-Kinney (Olympia) and Death Cab (Bellingham) have their origins outside of the city. The inclusion of acts that have played in Seattle is hardly exclusive, though: I’m not sure I can name any major acts that have never played a Seattle stage. I know Elvis, The Beatles and Led Zeppelin have had memorable instances in their respective careers in the 206 area code.

One cool thing about the dining and memorabilia experience is that each booth has an interactive monitor that lets you learn about certain items as well as zoom in close enough to notice small details on each item.

The Hard Rock Café will still be the spot for tourists to eat Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Sandwich underneath Eddie Vedder’s guitar while hearing U2 and Stevie Ray Vaughan overhead. Ok, the club sandwich part I made up (or maybe remember from a previous trip to the since-closed Hard Rock in Vancouver years ago with my family, but it’s not on the list of menu items I was given), but that isn’t to say that’s all that it is.

I certainly agree, but I wasn’t the first to note that arguably the savviest move the Hard Rock made in Seattle was hiring Amy Bauer as part of their sales and marketing team and as their booker. Bauer, as many Seattle music insiders know, spent many years running day-to-day operations for Loveless Records (the label co-owned by John Richards of KEXP), where they released several albums by local artists like Voyager One, New Faces, Pris, Vendetta Red and Carrie Akre. I met Bauer for the first time just a little over a week before this tour at a party for the Grammy Awards and she was very excited then to tell me some of the ideas that she had for booking shows at the Hard Rock. She hasn’t unveiled a full schedule but did say that she planned on having Tuesday night residencies with local artists, labels or blogs booking weekly shows for a month. Another idea she floated was all-ages matinee shows on weekends. Those aren’t the ideas of a corporation conscience of their bottom line but of someone given the opportunity to be a part of the community it serves. Not entirely unrelated, the Hard Rock will serve Caffe Vita coffee.

I did ask Bauer how aggressively she would pursue booking out-of-town acts and she said that she wasn’t there to compete with their neighbors at the Showbox at the Market but wanted to be the place where those acts come for dinner; she noted the capacity of the Hard Rock compared to the Showbox’s (477 vs. 1200ish). While that’s true, the space is more comparable to the Crocodile’s (whose capacity is around 560) and Chop Suey (which has a similar capacity to the Hard Rock).

We’ll have to wait until her schedule is revealed, but from the time I’ve spent talking to Bauer, she doesn’t see the Hard Rock as competition for any live music venue but as another place for bands to play. Of course, every thriving scene needs more, not fewer, venues for artists to perform. Moreover, if the restaurant was going to be a major player in luring high-profile acts, that would have been a focus of the tour and the shows would have already been announced.

Early March is when Bauer said that live music would begin. Thus far, the only band I know of to announce they are playing at the Hard Rock is the hip hop/rock hybrid Eli Porter, who revealed they are playing March 6 on Twitter and on their website.

The staffers I spoke with who had backgrounds in music or were familiar with this scene were not hesitant to say that they were worried about how they’d be received in Seattle. Seattle, unlike a lot of other major cities, has a strong indie rock ethos and is protective of that ideal (even if bands like Death Cab and Modest Mouse are no longer “indie” and have considerable mainstream success). That’s certainly true, but a music community that cares about itself is hardly a bad thing. Moreover, the link I included above about the Vegas hotel altering Kurt Cobain’s guitar is more than troubling, but if the Hard Rock is going to win over a skeptical audience that could think the chain is already “lame”, they’ll have to do it, like a vice chairman of the Seminole tribe said when they bought the chain, one hamburger at a time. For whatever it is worth, the Seattle Hard Rock Café is definitely not lame: the technology is quite advanced for a restaurant; the rooftop terrace is gorgeous and offers a remarkable view; everyone on the staff I spoke with was friendly, knowledgeable and helpful, including the lovely cashier in the gift shop I talked to when I purchased a pin for a collector in my family; it’s a big improvement to the neighborhood that brought in a lot more jobs and I was assured that diners would be pleased with the happy hour specials on both food and drinks (from 3-6 and 8-10pm).

In the end, though, the Hard Rock Café is still a restaurant and it will either flourish or flounder based on how good the food is and how good it’s served. I haven’t tried it yet, but am anxious to give it a shot.

{All photos by Lori Paulson.}