by ·Comments Off on Decoder (1984, Muscha)

Some fabulous images in here, this Muscha is a real visionary. It’s also the movie that knocked me unconscious the most times this year, so many times that we have a running joke that “watching Decoder” means going to sleep early.

Mostly we follow a guy with floppy hair (FM Einheit, a Neubauten percussionist). He’s either a slacker punk kid or a secret agent, or possibly the former who falls into being the latter. He ends up stealing some dissonant noise tech and turning it against the dominant burger restaurant chain, which gets him hunted by a world-weary government agent with access to total surveillance (New Yorker Bill Rice of Sleepwalk and Vortex).

A tape-dissonance operative standing in front of Fassbinder’s death notices:

The guy from Soft Cell shows up to sing “Sleazy City.” They can’t afford computer graphics so they film arcade games off a screen. Sometimes a guy with a hidden face talks in the voice of William Burroughs. The surveillance operatives are always watching a Fritz Lang movie on one screen (so am I). When cornered on a subway car, our guy starts drumming on the walls, the cop falls down covering his ears but nobody else in the car seems to mind. Also: death frogs.

by ·Comments Off on Rock Docs and Concerts, part 5

The Devil and Daniel Johnston (2005, Jeff Feuerzeig)

RIP Daniel. This was jaw-dropping, I had no idea.

“He spent some time in Bellevue, a day or two, was released through a clerical error, and actually opened for Firehose at CBGB that night.” It all sounds perfectly unbelievable, “print the legend,” larger-than-life biography, but Daniel is real and wonderful, so you follow along from his humble beginnings as the stories get wilder. I kept pausing the movie to tell Katy stories until she asked if I was Forgotten Silvering her. Then Daniel wrestles control of his dad’s plane, cuts the engine and throws the keys out the window, and you’ve entered new ground for a rock doc.

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Industrial Accident: The Story of Wax Trax! Records (2018, Julia Nash)

Katy overheard me watching this, said it seems like there’s a lot of talk and not much music, and she’s not wrong. Wax Trax! was started by a gay couple in the 1970’s, and this is very much their story, with the colorful rock & roll stories as decoration. In fact it could’ve used more WT! music – when the label starts taking off with some Ministry singles, we hear “To Hell With Poverty” instead of Ministry. Nice touch: we hear someone say “Nine Inch Nails was a terrible catalyst,” before showing the heretic speaking the words (it’s Reznor). The label was said to be popular in the bible belt (“It almost seemed the more conservative a small town you were in, the more you needed a Revolting Cocks record”), and in fact one of the label cofounders left it all behind and moved to Arkansas in the mid-90’s, right about when I was in Arkansas discovering all this music for the first time. The Amphetamine Reptile movie was 100x better, but this one is more emotional.

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MC5: A True Testimonial (2002, David Thomas)

I watched this despite having listened to the group’s “Kick Out The Jams” album this summer and thinking it was just okay… and after watching, it turns out the MC5 is the greatest band in the history of rock & roll. One of the most unconventionally affectionate rock docs I’ve seen, with not a single celebrity testimonial, just the surviving band members and their friends and family, making the band seem smaller than they were, which lets the music (and there’s lots of it!) speak for itself.

MC5 faced down the police, constantly got arrested for obscenity, faced down the US fuckin’ Army, and formed the White Panther movement because they wished they could be as cool as the Black Panthers.

The internet says Wayne Kramer suppressed the movie for 15+ years, boooo.

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Apocalypse: A Bill Callahan Tour Film (2012, Hanly Banks)

Between songs, some very short interviews, scraps of wisdom and insight. Grab all you can from the Apocalypse man. A few short years later in 2019, Bill is healthy and happy, wide open, chatty and content, touring on another consecutive masterpiece record. Back in 2012, this was more than we expected, and it was good, each song with its own visual scheme, as in the best concert films.

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Also watched some live Malkmus/Jicks

Some reunion-era Ween

Yo La Tengo with Jad Fair

Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever

and Courtney Barnett

by ·Comments Off on Eraserhead (1977, David Lynch)

“Look at my knees. Look at my knees!”
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Things I’d forgotten about Eraserhead:

The curled insect-ring Henry gets in a tiny box in the mail and puts in a cabinet:
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The sequence of events leading to the eraser factory. Henry enters the radiator, stands behind a railing, the baby’s head pops out of his neck, knocking his adult head on the checkered-floor ground. Blood pools, head falls into the pool and splats onto the street outside. A bum looks interested, his arm outstretched, but a boy grabs the head and runs, enters the factory. A man (Paul, below left) anxiously presses a buzzer until a bearded man (below right) comes out pointing his finger “OKAY, Paul!” Bearded man takes the boy into the back room where the eraser technician tests the head. “It’s okay.”
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Kinda felt like I was going through the motions as cinephile and Lynch-fanatic going out by myself to watch Eraserhead on 35mm on the big screen… but WOW was it ever awesome. Such beautiful dark, dark imagery, and amazing to see it as intended sitting in a dark theater away from the comforts of home. Movie is a nightmare – that’s the most accurate description I can think of. Sure it’s a “horror film” among other things, but more importantly it is the closest thing I’ve seen to an actual filmed nightmare. There are no “dream sequences” because there’s no reality… the whole film follows a fascinating dream logic.

Made 30 years ago now. Mary’s mother Jeanne Bates (who also appeared in Mulholland Dr.) died last year. Sound man David Splet (who also worked on Days of Heaven and four other Lynch films) died in ’95. The actor who played Paul at the eraser factory, also in two John Carpenter films around the same time, died in ’98. Everyone else seems to be doing fine, but I also learned that assistant director Catherine Coulson later played the Log Lady on Twin Peaks, and co-cinematographer Fred Elmes (also shot five other Lynch movies and films by Cassavetes, Jim Jarmusch, Albert Brooks, Ang Lee, Mira Nair, and Charlie Kaufman’s new Synecdoche New York) is the only person listed on the whole IMDB to be born in Mountain Lakes, NJ. A hometown celebrity – and it’s a GOOD one!

Jack Nance was murdered Dec. 30, 1996. His final film was Lost Highway. Despite the IMDB’s claims, he’s not the same Jack Nance who co-wrote “It’s Only Make Believe” with Conway Twitty… wake up, IMDB.
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Jack Fisk (below), alive and well and married to Sissy Spacek, has been production designer / art director on all four Terrence Malick films, two by De Palma, two by Lynch, and There Will Be Blood – an impressive career!
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