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Worn By Worn Out

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SXSW has come to a close and I’ve discovered that the key to an enjoyable week’s worth of music is saying to hell with the showcases and concentrating on the day parties. Times are tight, and if that means standing in line and chugging free sponsor swill like UV pink lemonade flavored vodka and Rose’s Austin-Jitos, well, so be it. This is what little I remember…

Anathallo – Arcade Fire without the French Canadian pomposity. It’s a joke! C’mon, I love French Canadians… except maybe for Martin Lapointe. I’ve heard that guy’s a dick.

Amanda Palmer – One half of the Dresden Dolls. She was getting a ton of word-of-mouth over the week, but 2pm in an Austin tent are not the best conditions for angry, Brechtian keyboard-pounding.

Black Joe Lewis – I was disappointed that I wouldn’t be able to see the Bar-Kays this week. Catching the Black Joe Lewis set at the Paste Magazine party more than made up for that.

Port O’Brien – A Northern California band whose sound is very familiar. Very familiar. There’s some Band of Horses, a little M. Ward, a dash of Bon Iver… not that there’s anything wrong with that.

The Drones – Apparently I typed this at some point later that evening: “why am I liking this?” What I imagine the result would be if Sonic Youth was forced at gunpoint to play classic rock.

Passion Pit – Very fun and very exuberant synth-pop. I appreciate the fact that they all look like guys that would hang out at the computer lab in high school.

Bishop Allen – I had one of those odd time/space slips when catching a chunk of Mutual Appreciation on IFC the night before seeing Bishop Allen. When the fuck did calypso become the new black.

Daniel Johnston – Showed up late and immediately tried the patience of the shuffling throng of hipsters. God bless him… he still knows the basics of a good, catchy pop song.

The Wrens – Another band (along with New Radiant Storm King) that got dumped when Alan Meltzer purchased Grass Records and turned it into a factory for crap. Seeing these guys play live again and hearing rumblings of a new record makes you think that maybe things will get better.

Black Lips – Only Cole Alexander can rock a pancho/pilgrim hat ensemble and make that shit work.

Echo and the Bunnymen – Much like Devo later that evening across town—or even Metallica later on the same stage—no one needs me to describe this to them.

I need to address the Rachel Ray party separately because of the dissonant feelings it arouses. I realize this is the second year in a row she’s hosted a SXSW party and many have already gotten the WTF out of their systems. For starters, The Cringe (her husband’s band) had a prominent spot on the bill. Yes, The Cringe sucks in a way that makes you wince more out of sympathy than animosity but I still think it’s kind of sweet that she enthusiastically champions them on, hoping that her zeal will be contagious. Of course it’s nepotism in its most garish form but I find it hard to hate her for it. Who knows, maybe it’s all that corn syrup from the mojitos still in my bloodstream. Regardless of the personality throwing the party, the Hold Steady and New York Dolls were both predictibly great and the ancho-chicken tacos and mini burgers were tasty. Major quibble: why start the Thermals set and open the doors for a line that literally circles the entire block simultaneously? To serenade the arriving throngs? It’s pretty disconcerting to finally get in only to see gear being packed up.

Eh, there’s always next year.

The Stars at Night Are Big and Bright…

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Not that anyone truly cares, but the neglect in posting updates has been due to the big move. The missus and I have successfully braved the winds of first Gustav, then Ike, and I now feel comfortable in declaring the relocation from Brooklyn to Austin 100% complete. Now we need to steel ourselves for the traffic and teeming masses of ACL just down the hill.

Paging Dr. Dickel

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I don’t know why, but as summer approaches I always get a powerful yen for bourbon—specifically, the Tennessee sour mash of one George A. Dickel. Now, technically, this isn’t bourbon per se, due to the charcoal filtration that most Tennessee whiskey receives (including the swill of the inferior Jack Daniel’s) but I appreciate the way the word flows off the tongue.

This led me to invent a cocktail: a fiery blend of bourbon and Dr. Pepper, only later to discover that said drink had already been claimed and named. But, as I rarely allow facts to impede my personal aggrandizement, I refined the concoction and renamed it Dr. Dickel. The invention goes back to the summer of 1998, during production of the film The Wind, on which I was acting as Production Designer. A low-budget independent thriller, The Wind was being filmed in and around the Connecticut hometown of writer/director Michael Mongillo with family, friends and a few hired pros. Being in the “friend” camp, I stayed at his parent’s house, which was also being used as a location. In spite of the hard work, long hours and turmoil that weirdly cling to indie filmmaking like crab lice, there was a summery vibe to the proceedings, as though we were at sleepaway camp learning how to make a movie.

Mike’s mother Lucille was taking on the daunting task of running craft services and the bulk of her supplies were downstairs in the garage. This is where I discovered a stash of Dr. Pepper one late night after a particularly arduous day of making props and dressing sets. Whether it was the inspiration of exhaustion or simple convenience, an immediately logical pairing came to my mind. I married the spicy/cherry soda with Dickel’s finest in a tumbler with ice and offered a toast to the day’s toil. Over the course of the next two weeks, a nightly tradition gradually took shape, with Lu and I—and whomever else had the time or inclination at that hour—gathering out on the covered porch of the ranch house to imbibe and listen to the warm fugue of crickets.

The cocktail provided a soothing elixir to the harsh reality of making a movie from scratch and the tradition was revived several summers later, when a handful of us found ourselves back at the Mongillos’, this time working on my feature Broken. The scale was somewhat smaller but the feeling remained, evoked as much by the bittersweet, suburban vibe as the good doctor himself. Yeah. So that’s how it is with recollections and distillations. Thank God it wasn’t Mr. Pibb.

Best of…

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As 2007 drew to a close, I came to realize some superficial similarities and stark differences in my favorite album and movie of the year. 

 

Band of Horses’ sophomore release for Sub Pop Cease to Begin opens with Is There a Ghost and closes with Window Blues–as disparate as two songs on the album could be–and in between are the peaks and valleys of a band growing increasingly more confident. Ben Bridwell’s vocals, while still haunting, aren’t nearly as awash in reverb as they were on Everything All the Time and the guitars are prominent and clean, creating what truly feels like an epic record, in spite of its 35 minutes.

 

No Country for Old Men continues the Coen Brothers’ facility for crafting precise film-length set pieces. Essentially a monster movie wherein the monster is a hit-man armed with a cattle stun gun, the film creates a bleak, beautiful landscape where everything is fair game. Much like the experience of watching Miller’s Crossing, where each shadow, sound and piece of scenery is expertly placed, “No Country” feels like a two-hour film class (but in a good way). 

 

The similarities are pretty evident to anyone with an appreciation for both the rugged, Neil Young-flavored indie rock of Band of Horses and Cormac McCarthy‘s dry, Texas desolation. There’s a sparse loneliness to both that speaks to a rural terrain both idyllic and painful, inhabited by nothing but dust and phantoms. On the Coens’ side, much of that is due to Richard Deakins’ masterful cinematography, an aesthetic that harkens back to the classic grandeur of John Ford, yet filtered with a trailer-park vérité. For Band of Horses, its a progression of roots music stoked by bands like Uncle Tupelo and Eleventh Dream Day.

 

What I’m starting to find more interesting are the differences, primarily in the unapologetic sense of hope running through Cease to Begin, as opposed to the coal black cynicism evident throughout No Country. When Bridwell sings, “…the world is such a wonderful place,” you get the sense that he’s trying, really trying, to convince himself. This is a world unrecognizable, even ironically, in the Coens’ scrubland of west Texas–illustrated in screaming, 72-point type as Tommy Lee Jones pontificates on facing the kind of evil that goes beyond understanding. Humans will do bad things to one another, that’s an incontrovertible truth.

 

Taken together, both represent the culture of a damaged era. The question concealed within each is, “how do we heal?” That’s a tough question. Shit, it’s one for the ages, in fact. Personally, I’m discovering that the difficulty in the answer to that question is likely what’s been driving me to keep writing and making films. I’m sure it goes for others, as well.

Avoidance Behavior

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There has been a dearth of posts on this godforsaken site since the summer and since I’m the one responsible, it’s time to come clean: I’m not very good at blogging. It’s unwieldy, time-consuming bullshit.

No, I don’t fully mean that, but it does require thought and time to type, two things that have been a scarce commodity this past year. I’ll avoid the self-indulgent ritual of listing the day-to-day obstacles that impede both my creative endeavors and the documentation of those same endeavors, but a lot has gone down this year. I’m aware that’s worded with ominous, bass-heavy undertones but the majority of the distractions have been fun. An anxious, turbulent kind of fun, but fun nonetheless.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the Hudson River School, it’s the profound irrelevance of a church when you can always find a cliff in the Catskills.

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