What else could possibly represent the Tribeca Film Festival’s odd combination of real estate speculation, downtown nostalgia, self-mythology, and liquid assets better than a Warhol-checking film from the one-time maker of Blank Generation, shot out of the casement window of his Manhattan apartment? Amos Poe, standing before a clutch of vaguely affluent Tuesday-nighters in the converted lobby of the Gershwin Hotel, wears star-freckled pajama pants as he introduces his “no budget, no wave” version of Rear Window: Empire II, after Warhol’s eight-hour original. Poe’s film—a year’s worth of footage compressed into three hours, with all the day and night and snow, spring, and rain the interval entailed—simulates a wandering but comfortably ensconced Flatiron eye, shot out of some seriously sizeable windows, often past a varied and pleasingly fresh array of flowers that share the sill with his camera.
If Warhol’s unblinking Empire was stubbornly about the minutes you passed watching it, or the minutes you watched passing it, Empire II evokes the feeling really good real estate gives you: being completely impervious to time. Poe’s idyll is unmolested by the pedestrians he occasionally deigns to film, the cars that zip by them, the clocks that turn in a nearby tower. Clouds race by, their shadows with them, but the view remains eternal.
Preempting what for the ages will supposedly be “a richly layered soundtrack of songs and city noises” are, tonight, Thurston Moore, Matt Hayner, and Tom Surgal, improvising accompaniment directly in front of, and a little bit below, Poe’s film. They seem to be present mostly to alleviate boredom, which they do: Moore’s cunning abstractions match perfectly with the hexagonal lights of cars that cross the screen, the band’s improv keeping time with Amos’s cut-for-cut-for-cut eye on the motion outside. Surgal, facing forward, isn’t even watching the film. As it speeds by behind the trio, they appear to be working in slow motion, another ironic reduction in scale—if the Empire State building can play prop, why not three grizzled no-wavers?
Empire II plays on Friday, May 2 @ Pace University and Saturday, May 3 @ Village East Cinema.
Things I Learned from Watching Shine a Light
Union Square
April 17
Blame it on the debates last night, the spectacle one more time of a supposed elder talking sternly down to anyone in earshot who happens to be younger, the upshot as always I was there, as if being present then were somehow proxy for being fit to be present anywhere, in any position, ten or twenty or forty years later. Thus Shine a Light’s Keith Richards can blithely intone, as if bestowing upon his audience some timeworn piece of wisdom, “It’s good to see you all. It’s good to see anybody,” with an absolute surety as to the equal anonymity of anyone not named Mick, Charlie, or Ronnie, and his audience will crack up—because, of all things, they basically agree.
No surprise the Rolling Stones, circa 2008, turn out to be the kind of band—as we find out, a few thousand feet up in first class—that splits the list of potential songs for the night’s set into the categories of “Well Known” and “Medium Known.” Boiling self-regard scalds tepid modesty, and so we get Bill Clinton introducing the band by noting his birthday present is “opening” for the Rolling Stones. Aced out entirely in proceedings is the film’s ostensible maker, Marty Scorcese, who has at last apparently found four men whose schtick is more entrenched than his own. He can’t get a set list, which is hilarious, because who, at this point, doesn’t know exactly what the band is going to play?
All credit to Buddy Guy, who comes onstage in front of the two Clintons in the audience to vow he’ll get high tomorrow, just as sure as his name, and none to Keith Richards, who apparently mistakes him for a guy who’s short on guitars, and so gives him one at the end with the preposterous benediction: “It’s yours.” “I don’t think onstage,” says Keith, offstage, “I feel.”
Scorcese, meanwhile, realizes what he’s up against too late, and settles for his own version of two hours of greatest hits: arrhythmic cutting, cameras that swoop, fun at the mixer when the camera gets close in on a Keith (but somehow, never Ronnie) solo, a Goodfellas nod at the end, when he walks the camera backstage and then outside, past, yup, a couple more Marty Scorceses and, for a finale, transforming a CGI moon over Manhattan into a Rolling Stones tongue. “I did a thousand things over there,” he says to no one in particular, “And nothing that I needed to do.”
One more sign of how yawningly distant Baghdad is from New York—the sight of Vice idiots Suroosh Alvi and and Eddy Moretti strapping on flak jackets outside their Baghdad hotel, spooked like guys who just happened to take a wrong turn on their way to work out on N. 10th St. Into the frame rush the security team, a band of shooters that starts at two and swells to 12 as the local Iraqis realize their wards have literally no conception of the danger they’re dealing with. “Journalists…it’s not safe for them,” one guard finally breaks down and explains. “Or for the guys that protect them.”
This to say nothing of the predicament that the subjects of last night’s doc, Heavy Metal in Baghdad, find themselves in. First-and-so-far-last-ever Iraqi metal band Acrassicauda—“the Black Scorpion,” named for the most deadly of all scorpions—can’t really headbang (looks like Jewish prayer), can’t really wear Slipknot t-shirts (looks American), can’t grow their hair long (ditto), can’t play a show pre-Saddam without including “Youth of Iraq” (the “Freebird”-type request/demand made by Saddam’s Culture and Media Ministry, in which Arassicauda take the bait and rhyme “Hussein” with “insane”). After Saddam, the four guys can’t really go outside at all, and then their practice space gets rocketed.
Enter Vice, who take a Gideon Yago tip and decide to sponsor a show in post-occupation Baghdad. Alvi and Moretti do the gonzo thing—lots of chest-hair, aviator lenses, and giggling—until they finally make it into the country and realize this time, they might really die. Friendship with the four Arassicaudans ensues. The Americans miss the first concert go-round, in a not-quite-Green Zone hotel where the power keeps failing, but finally zig-zag in from the airport intact. They smoke cigarettes on their hotel roof, watch the helicopters fly by, and meet in secret with band ringleader Firas al-Lateef, who plays bass and is the group’s philosopher—“It’s just a crazy mission, dude” he apologetically tells Moretti and Alvi, when they ask about their prospects.
A reunion in Damascus ensues, where the band can’t work and its members live in the unheated basement of a Syrian project. The neighbors complain about the noise, so practice is out, but the band gets in one show and, on Vice’s dime, a recording session. Afterwards they all hit the hotel minibar and Marwan, the drummer, is so happy he promises the camera: “I’m gonna tell my kids about this, if I ever have one of those fuckers.” (Firas, who has one already, makes no such promise.) Then they see Vice footage of their time back in Iraq and two of them start crying. All credit to Moretti and Alvi, who’ve filmed enough faux fucked-up stuff to not flinch when they stumble onto the real thing.
News from the Q+A afterwards is that Arassicauda are now in Turkey (tickets courtesy of Vice donation drive), after being denied entry to the US, Canada, Germany, Sweden, France, and the UK. Alvi and Moretti remain in touch, and both sat in on the band’s most recent (read: third) round of interviews with Homeland Security. Slipknot’s manager is interested, as are much of the rest of the metal community, but they’ve got to get here first.
ThreeotherVoice typists have done pieces related to the new Todd Haynes prism about a certain awesome Jewish male performer whose most ebullient song about marriage is tellingly entitled “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere.” But the freelancin’ mustn’t stop until it’s a half-dozen articles deep, in order to better homage the film’s six-Dylan homage! And as a tribute to the film’s spirit of disjoint, my column won’t bother with coherence! It’ll be a bunch of unsubstantiated ideas! But please, consider its structure “complicated,” like that of banana pudding when tossed into unicycle spokes.
[Popping pills and donning Wayfarers]: Cuz nobody thinks in ordered paragraphs, maaan, except popes and po-leece! Linearity’s for squares. You can’t, like, contain the planet’s moodswings with a calendar any more than you can airbrush away an IED. Thesis Christ on a clipboard—
I was going to say something very I-went-to-grad-school-in-the-nineties about the black-kid Dylan, but the audience at the projection that I attended was over twenty percent African-American, so. There was also a hippie adult letting a liberated child run around the theater making all kinds of noise, and none of us ticketholders griped about it, because the sixties and all. During one of the film’s somber moments, an usher came in, and asked, “Has someone lost a son, or a boy? He’s roaming the street outside?” But the ponytailed father-figure didn’t claim the tyke! I thought for sure that Haynes had staged this sideshow as some kind of promotional bonus, like buzzers in the seats of screenings of 1959’s The Tingler, as a nod to Dylan’s apprentice year.
Still, I found the occasion/event of the film…embarrassing to be at. Maybe on an old sofa, accompanied by a lover, or a gaggle of Dylan-geeks, watching it’d be fine, but in a theater, with a straw and a lid… I can’t get sober enough to explain what felt wrong about it. And anyway, in the film’s world, sobriety’s a caricature and explanations are obstructions to enlightenment.
A toast to the cast: Christian Bale as Michael Landon, Ben Whishaw as Nick Cave, Heath Ledger as Sean Penn, Richard Gere as Neil Young, etc. All were excellent. Cate Blanchett’s Dylan substitute Jude Quinn was almost as good as Edward Norton’s turn as the bald Oops Toxic in the similarly promethean Britney Spears un-biopic I’m Totally Not.
Flick presents peerlessness as a curse. Understandable, but why not raise the dramatic stakes by having a few of the Dylans encounter each other? “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” (That’s from Yeats, and if you find that kind of context-less literary quoting pompous, you have probably already hated I’m Not There.) But staging a Dylan (or Dylans) thinking and writing the songs that are the reason that we love most of the rest of “the stuff about him” wouldn’t be as cinematic, reckon. So the film gives us “his life” again, but even that is done dishonestly, as usual in that it pretends that Dylan died in the mid-seventies, his white wives and children conveniently eclipsing his later “secret” black ones. Of course, Faulkner told his daughter, “Nobody remembers Shakespeare’s children.” (See how I acted like quote was earned, or seemed to follow? Learnt that trick from Todd Haynes.) Honestly, I don’t “care” about Dylan’s life—just his work. The “real” context has nothing to do with how his music has contextualized some of my favorite evenings during my one stay on earth.
Flick feigns political/progressive seriousness, but is actually much more interesting in fetishizing “the cool.” You know: detachment, decadence, fashion, and nice old/new cars. Like, Merchant-Ivory’s Turbulent Times. While coveting the togs, you can almost hear a Bank Of America opening somewhere in the distance. The film’s most sixties trait is how fervently it maintains its delusions of being revolutionary. Now that the computers have returned us to the pre-Proper Noun days in which everybody’s an artisan and no one’s a Picasso, how self-importantly can a non-groupie watch someone (even—gulp—Dylan) be depicted? Guernica itself ends up being (aesthetically amazing) fan-fiction, something for a dissenter to look at wistfully while wars wage on in spite of its warning. As long I masturbatype about Dylan’s “undeniable” cultural impact, I get to live in a world too vividly conscious to have allowed two George W. Bush terms. Anyway, the episode of General Electric/Vivendi/Universal/NBC’s The Office, during which Dwight gets applause at a business conference for a speech that he plagiarized from Mussolini, is more subversive than this film (if just as fanciful).
Flick is most disingenuous, for all its supposed narrative freedom, about how much fucking narrative weight it thrusts upon the viewer without any commitment or payoff. Piles of names and gads of scenario exposition, for too little purpose. Oooh, intrigue-balls: Who’s that calling about the hobo child? Hmmm, why’s that Western-ish town bailing on itself? Gee, who will comfort the French skeleton lady? Oh, okay, that was all just red herrings and non sequiturs, like Dylan’s unpindownable identity! I get it! No, that was like the sick triceratop’s big pile of shit that had nothing to do with the remainder of Jurassic Park. Or like Sherlock Holmes Flips You The Bird For Paying Attention.
The film offers another brothy regurgitation of the mega-uber-pivotal Judas-yelping moment, but it’s made up for by a great Ginsberg-accompanied scene mocking a giant crucifix. Then, sigh, the film has to go and buy into that motorcycle-wreck martyr-myth. (That a particular indie-rock comedian playing Ginsberg contributes to the four of the films sections’ echoing skits from Mr. Show, with, you know, “Bob” and David.)
To be fair: I almost wept when the kid visited Woody Guthrie’s deathbed, an emotional response which made “sense” to my artless gauchery of a self. But I have no idea why I explodo-sobbed during Jim James’ Rolling Thunder-faced pantomiming of “Goin To Acapulco.” So Todd Haynes’ elliptical logic got some licks past my defenses, even if I found that sequence less Fellini-meets-Pat-Garrett than Deadwood-versus-Carnivale. Maybe I’s crying for ego/biographical reasons, feeling convicted by the realization that the film was about aborting one’s idealism, and then dodging the burden of mourning that abortion through disappearing into artifice (or into the real Dylan’s current becostumed workaholism).
And I hereby yield that Haynes’ using the one-dimensional Mason Jennings as the vox for the “sincere,” “finger-pointing” Dylan and the next-dimensional Stephen Malkmus as the mouthpiece for the wordplayful, slippery Dylan was brilliant.
The film’s chief strength, though: it contains lots of actual Dylan music, but the songs are introduced in a gratingly repetitive manner, as “climaxes” to Wes Anderson/Garden-Stately scenes that exist to justify their fade-ins. Leaving the theatre on a manic Dylan high, I was prepared to dedicate my existence to thinking about his songs, and actually worried about not having any heroes after spending my twenties pouring cynical Drano on my idol-clogged imagination. But then an SUV passed blaring Hurricane Chris’ “A Bay Bay,” so all the way home I just thought. “A bay bay/ A bay bay.” Great tune. Could be karaoked alongside “Lay Lady Lay.” Who am I trying to kid? I’m Not There, like most nostalgia trips, leads one to despair.
Capsule summary of last week’s episode: Michael Tully made a documentary about The Silver Jews’ trip to Israel. Its chronicle of Silver honcho David Berman’s sincerity and religiosity might be traumatizing for some of his fan-children unhealthily committed to aping their projections/internalizations of Berman’s previous ever-buzzed, linguistic-trickster persona.
“When I was younger I was a cobra: In every case I wanted to be cool.
Now that I’m older and subspace is colder, I just want to say something true.”
—from the Silver Jews’ “The Frontier Index”
Okay Mr. Berman, but what are your slavish fans supposed to do as we age, especially if we lack the luxury of having been born into a faith we can take semi-seriously? Plus many of us have been educated and acculturated to find “truth” problematic. An apparent immunity to what my fellow South Carolinians considered satisfyingly “meaningful” enabled my absurd substitution of a fervor for 90s lo-fi recordings onto the altar where some other folks positioned spirituality or money or both or whatever in the first place. And Mr. Berman, many of your slavish fans, like you, are unblossoming into grownup-ness. We lately agree with you that cool detachment is a prophylactic against the immediacy of being an earthling. Our thrift-drag became our skin, too: we see what is totally out-of-place and yet kinda fitting about your wearing a trucker hat and a Western shirt to read and weep at Jerusalem’s Western Wall in Michael Tully’s film. (Take it from Grampa Polydenim, any nubile and impressionable column-skimmers out there, adulthood happens like this: For a deceptively extended interval you’re young and brilliant, young and drunk, young and sexy, young and high, and then—SHABAM—one afternoon you wake from a nap looking like Paul Westerberg.) In Wendy Fonarow’s attempt at indie-rock-anthropology Empire Of Dirt, she calls reaching the thirties a music-slut’s “sell by” date. Criminy. I’m at risk of ending up like that terrifying Onion headline: “Family Unsure What To Do With Dead Hipster's Possessions.” Please, God in whom I do not believe, permittest not a Tokyo Police Club promo to be playing when my heart attacks.
All self-absorption aside: Good for David Berman. The film captures an artist who has beat his addictions, and who found a complementary life (and creative) partner. Fans will relish his band-origin stories, his explanation of his strategies for dealing with the press, and his lofty opining about religio-states. Non-fans can even enjoy the film’s bits touching on messianic delusion, women’s need to cover their tainted flesh at officially magical—I mean sacred—places, and the hassle of bargaining with local merchants. Most powerful is getting to watch Berman’s protective cynicism erode, as he curses his reluctance to feel in the 90s and is flooded by his audiences’ positivity. When he seems blown away by their being some of the “nicest people,” he rebaptizes that word—“nice” ceases to be descriptive styrofoam and is beautiful again, its benevolence radiant and legitimate. As Berman dives from the stage to hug crowdmembers, the viewer can’t resist imagining that he’s thanking them for saving this version of his life.
Yet: watching someone with such a sharp mind talk so hippie-ly about receiving universal answers can be hard, especially if the viewer doubts that a near-suicide would rejigger their own theology-lobe. But religion was a major presence in Berman’s work all along: every album contains (retroactively portentous) references to Jewishness and Judeo-Christian mythology. Even his book of poetry begins with angels, hypothetically restages Christ’s deathplace, and ends with a Lord/God/Bible trifecta. Jesus is so prominent in Berman’s lyrics that I figured the songwriter to be due for a 1970’s-Dylan-style fundie trip. Ah well: I remember a review of Pavement in, like, Spin, which claimed that “Fight This Generation” was proof of how (original Silver Jew) Stephen Malkmus had gazed into the abyss so much that it was gazing back into him. Maybe Berman’s early work jokily looked too long at the light, and that’s why he now claims to have seen “God’s shadow on this world.” Hey, here’s a pitch: For the sequel 2 Silver 2 Jew: Return To Irony’s Bosom, Tully could catch Berman eating a Goliathburger at Orlando’s Jews-for-Jesus attraction The Holy Land Experience.
Silver Jew has screened in Austin, Sarasota, Nashville, Boston, Glasgow, and London. It plays in Detroit November 3, and in Leeds on November 9 and 13. A DVD release is forthcoming via Drag City after the new Joos LP drops in February 2008.
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