Cineblog

It is only slightly over 20 years ago that I saw Naked Raygun for the first time, an event of such enormous and life-changing proportions that it is almost impossible to begin to capture it. At some point after I get back from Chicago I will try. However, here is a taste. One of the best parts of seeing Naked Raygun was that they always came up with some fun and/or wacky-ass covers to do. Here is a small sampling of the songs I saw them do in the 30 or so times I attended their shows:

• Below The Drop - The Effigies
• Going Underground - The Jam
• Where We Live - Government Issue
• The Boys Are Back In Town - Thin Lizzy
• Suspect Device - Stiff Little Fingers
• Rock ‘N Roll Hootchie Coo - Rick Derringer
• Elephant’s Graveyard - Strike Under
• 20th Century Boy - T-Rex
• Every song The Buzzcocks ever recorded

In tribute to this pattern of excellence I present three covers from the boys.

Folsom Prison Blues (Johnny Cash) - Recorded 7/21/1990 from a live broadcast on WRUW in Cleveland, OH.

Elephant’s Graveyard (Strike Under)
Love Battery (Buzzcocks) - Recorded 4/15/1985 at Peppermint Lounge in New York

These mp3s may disappear at any time, especially if my hosting is getting hammered but I have a pretty good bandwidth deal and nobody reads this anyways.

NOTE: Floating around the file sharing services is something labeled “Naked Raygun 1983 Demos” which is not that at all. It contains the studio versions of “I Lie”, “Potential Rapist”, “Metastasis”, “Surf Combat”, “Libido” and “Gear” in addition to something called “Untitled” and a cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Communication Breakdown”. So the first six songs are in fact Naked Raygun, the same versions as on Throb Throb and Basement Screams. The other two, I don’t know what they are, but they sure as hell aren’t Naked Raygun. Don’t be fooled.

Enjoy!

Last Thursday, October 19, Naked Raygun played a semi-unannounced warmup show at a small club in Chicago. I was bummed I couldn’t go, this was the first Chicago performance of Naked Raygun I’ve missed since September of 1986. Thank you, however, to the kind soul who posted this video on YouTube. The sound is for shit, but it really captures the spirit of being at a Raygun show with every goddamned freak in the crowd screaming WHOOOAH HOHHH with every last breath of air they can squeeze out of their almost-crushed lungs. I can not wait.

It is no coincidence that this is the second post in a row regarding YouTube, the site has consumed untold hours of my life these last few months. Where else can you find a long lost video by Tar, a Philadelphia dance party overdubbed with Naked Raygun and Husker Du, Siskel & Ebert outtakes (audio not safe for work), David Yow getting knocked out cold by a flying bottle, the history of XTC as told by puppets and hundreds of those music videos you loved from past and present. So many I can barely even begin to enumerate them. And this doesn’t even bring into account the gag videos and even serious short films. I <3 YouTube.

So a couple months ago I went to see Scratch Acid at The Showbox and I recorded a video of them playing “Damned For All Time” on my pocket camera. Like any good modern internet nerd I uploaded this video to YouTube for everyone’s enjoyment. After uploading this video, I noticed that someone else had uploaded a video of this same song (and others) from this same show. We had a good laugh about it in the comments. Then a couple weeks ago I found yet another video of this song, from this show, up on the site. The best thing about this last upload is that the right of the screen you can actually see me holding my camera filming the same song. So what you have here is a guy filming me filming Scratch Acid. That is pretty hilarious. I am also visible in this video between :25 and :30 ferociously rocking out to “Eyeball”. That was such a great fucking show.

In other rock and roll news, a couple of weeks from now Roya and I will be in Chicago where we will attend RiotFest. Bands I’m most looking forward to - Youth Brigade, 7 Seconds, Effigies and of course my punk rock idols Naked Raygun.

We’ll also be playing some pinball or something while we’re there.

If I wanted to listen to over-produced quasi-Springsteen bullshit I’d rent Eddie And The Cruisers.

Holy shit Greg’s blogging. So, uh, yeah. 5 months between posts. How about that. You know what it is? I get all up in arms about how everything has to be “written” so that it “makes sense” and you know “has a grand statement” or some shit. I’m done, I’m just gonna blurt and maybe there will be more stuff here as a result. It will probably be more annoying but it will also be a lot more like listening to me talk, for better and for worse.

So I noticed on the last.fm page of Spitball’s Burley Grymz that he was listening to podcasts of Sound Opinions, an NPR radio show out of Chicago featuring the rock critics from the big two newspapers - Greg Kot (Chicago Tribune) and Jim Derogatis (or “De-ro” as he is usually known, of the Chicago SunTimes.) I knew Greg Kot back in the day, I wrote some freelance capsules for him just out of college. He’s a great guy with great taste and a credit to rock crits everywhere. De-ro, well, um, he’s a character. He once played in a Wire cover band called The Ex-Lion Tamers that toured opening for Wire on The Ideal Copy tour playing Pink Flag from start to finish including the silences between songs. It all goes downhill from there.

Anyways I recently bought a new Mac Mini and seeing these podcasts got me playing around with that functionality in iTunes. So I set myself up for Sound Opinions and downloaded a few back episodes, one of which I burned to CD and listened to while cleaning my kitchen Sunday. This episode contained an interview with film composer extroardinaire Jon Brion. It’s a great show, Brion is smart and funny and obviously loves to talk about his craft. There’s an extended bit wherein he talks about the difference between performance based bands and song based bands, and how people react to them in different ways. He also discusses how he works and the trajectories his career has taken. I really recommend it, its great stuff.

At two points he takes time out to play a bit. The first one is just a song he wrote, and it’s cool, it made me curious about what a Brion solo record would sound like. Then at the end of the show he is asked to play again, and he thinks a bit and says “Well I’ll just play this little instrumental piece.” He sits at a piano and plays all of maybe five notes, and I was just frozen in my kitchen because I was instantly transported back to that moment in Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind where Joel has woken up after his brain is erased, and he’s kind of bumbling around before running away after the train to Montauk. This is what he is playing, the background music from this part of the film. There’s only one other composer whose music in film has had that effect on me and his name is Bernard Herrmann. OK I’ll add John Williams too, fine. Now I’m not ready to say Jon Brion is the next Bernard Herrmann, but his talent at taking his lilting waltzes and melding them to the film in question so that the two are perfectly complementary is umistakable and worthy of the utmost praise. He’s a smart and intelligent guy too? Sign me up, I declare myself a fan.

Sound Opinions is a fun show too, and I look forward to catching up on more episodes. Kot and De-ro have a real Siskel & Ebert vibe going, with them jabbing each other’s opposing tastes and generally stirring up trouble which is perfect for a rock show. Previously the show had been two hours on WXRT, a commercial station in Chicago targeted heavily towards boomers, but I think it’s a better show slimmed down to one and NPR is a perfect fit for them.

The Mac is cool too.

Edit: I meant to put in a link to this specific show so here it is. Also I just discovered a place you can stream the first two minutes of every song from one of Brion’s solo albums, and as predicted it is pretty great. Go nuts.

Films Today: 3
Running Total: 30

Had some schedule changes today, but it was all for the best it seems. First went to the Chuck Chaplin classic The Gold Rush. Most of my silent comedy time has been spent on Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, this was only the second Chaplin I’ve seen and I didn’t like it as much as The Circus which I saw at SIFF last year. It still had that heart that is lacking in Keaton and Lloyd, but The Circus is heartbreaking and this doesn’t have the same emotional center (although the scenes where Chaplin is left forgotten on New Year’s Eve are pretty sad.) Still there’s some good gags here, especially in the early going. I should note that this version is the 1942 re-release which added a voiceover speaking various lines and intertitles. This was kind of annoying frankly, and it is quite possible I would have enjoyed the original more. I still need to spend some time going through all the Chaplin as I’m sure I would enjoy it, and if they keep showing one at every SIFF I should be caught up by the year 2080 or something.

I was supposed to see Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man next, but instead chose to see Distant Journey, a rare Czech Holocaust film from 1950. I’m glad I did too because this was a pretty fascinating film. It centers around a Jewish woman who marries a gentile man, and their struggles trying (and ultimately failing) to keep their family, friends, and marriage together as more and more Jews are taken away to the concentration camps. Occasionally to stress the events going on in the world around them, the characters are shrunk down to a corner of the screen as newsreel footage plays behind them (including some scenes which are apparently from Triumph Of The Will) which was effective and cool. Frankly the whole style of the film was totally ahead of its time, with a great deal of warped expressionistic scenes and shots, culminating in a heavily stylized and somewhat surreal sequence involving the cleaning of a train full of typhus victims crosscut with a woman beating on a piano with a hammer. All other sounds completely dropped out of the soundtrack and the gongs of the strings are synchronized perfectly with the editing, cutting back and forth between survivors poking their heads out and eventually celebrating in the square, and this woman throwing everything she has into ringing out their freedom. It was a spectacular scene, especially considering this was 1950. I’m very glad I went to see this. It’s on a Facets DVD and well worth checking out. Odd note: I was just looking at imdb and it seems that some portion of this film is included in A Clockwork Orange. I can’t remember where that would be, assumedly in the horror shown to Alex as his eyes are forced open? It’s been too long since I’ve seen Clockwork (a movie I actively dislike) so if anyone can illuminate it would be appreciated.

Finally there was Perhaps Love, an enjoyable Hong Kong musical movie-within-a-movie following a director and his male and female leads. They are embroiled in a love triangle whose permutations are reflected in the movie they are filming, and as the two meet a series of unexpected circumstances play out which made the movie feel really fresh and intriguing. I totally thought I had it pegged at the middle and I was pleasantly surprised at the ways in which the script proved me wrong, in particular the ending which could have been completely trite and is instead subtle and real. Also interesting thematically are the parallels you can draw between the director character and many of his Hong Kong contemporaries in the real world. Early the onscreen director Nie Wen has to face questions from the media about his decision to produce a big budget mainstream picture. “Is this the end of Nie Wen the auteur?” they ask. Will Nie Wen leave Hong Kong and go to Hollywood with the actress who he made a star? It’s hard not to think of modern Hong Kong directors like John Woo and now Wong Kar-Wai when faced with such lines.

Many of the sequences in Perhaps Love are somewhat reminiscent of Moulin Rouge! in that they involve a modern music styles, except they are not as irritating because a) it’s original music done well b) the story actually makes sense and c) there are less of them. If anything Perhaps Love owes as much to the classic Hollywood musicals like Singin’ In The Rain as it does to the work of Baz Luhrmann. This doesn’t even mention the STUNNING cinematography from Peter Pau (The Promise, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon) and my hero Christopher Doyle. Definitely worth checking out if the above description doesn’t immediately turn you off. I had a discussion with someone the next day who just couldn’t get past the concept of a musical in Cantonese and if that’s you then don’t go. Should get a release somewhere down the road.
Finally I had tickets to see loudQUIETloud: A Film About The Pixies but I just wasn’t in the mood, which is too bad because from what I hear it was very good. Instead I went home and watched Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind on DVD. Has any movie in the last … well … ever … had a more perfect and lovely ending than that one? I swear it just slays me every time. It’s too bad Science Of Sleep doesn’t finish so strong (SPOILER!)

Tomorrow: NOIR! MORE NOIR! EVEN MORE NOIR!

Films Today: 1
Running Total: 27

I forgot to mention in the entry on The Puffy Chair that there was a short preceding it that was very good called I Am (Not) Van Gogh by David Russo. It was largely filmed at Bumbershoot last year, and it contains some really cool and fascinating stop motion animation done in the midst of a moving crowd. The setups were, I’m sure, enormously complex. The whole thing plays to a voiceover of him trying to sell the concept of the film we’re watching to some kind of arts funding organization. This voiceover is really the film’s only weak point, as it plays somewhat like a gag and is a little distracting. Still this is probably my second favorite short this year (behind My Dad Is 100 Years Old.) I just discovered in my Googling that Russo has been tapped for a Start To Finish grant from Northwest Film Forum, and I look forward to seeing what he produces.

I actually took the 7th and 8th off. I had two films scheduled (Factotum and Road To Guantanamo) and blew them both off for varying reasons. I’m really bummed about missing the Winterbottom, however it is coming to Pacific Place on July 7th, so I can catch it then.

On this day I saw the Tsui Hark action epic Seven Swords. I had never seen any of Hark’s other films, and although I’m not a huge fan of this film it made me interested enough to check out some more. Seven Swords is predictably enough heavily influenced by The Seven Samurai although there is plenty that is different enough to avoid it being a straight remake ala The Magnificent Seven. My biggest problem with it is that the fight scenes were poorly choreographed, with the exception of the final swordfight between the villain and the hero which was a ton of fun. Once you’ve seen a few films Yuen Woo-ping choreographed, you don’t put up with fights where you can’t follow the action. Other than that, not a lot of comments. A little long. There was this sort of goth-samurai chick in some scenes which was really weird. Half-shaved head with the rest hanging straight down in front of her face, heavy black eyeliner, full armor but all black, bigass leather boots. I’m sure someone is going to rent this based on that description alone.

Films Today: 2
Running Total: 26

6/5 was a day off, with no films. Urban Scarecrow was scheduled but we couldn’t face a 9:30 showing. If there’s one lesson learned from this SIFF it is to ease off on the late night showings on weekdays.

6/6 we had two screenings. First was Hell, directed by Danis Tanovic (who directed the Oscar winning No Man’s Land last year) from a script by Krzysztof Piesiewicz originally intended for Krzysztof Kieslowski. The is the second in their proposed series Heaven, Hell and Purgatory (Heaven was released a couple years ago, directed by Tom Tkwyer of Run Lola Run fame.) This ended up being my favorite modern fiction film from the fest. It is far more reminiscient of Kieslowski than Tkwyer’s entry was (although that is also a fine film.) There is one really nice visual reference to the Three Colors Trilogy that made me smile. The film itself follows the lives of three sisters, all of them on their own variety of collision course with an event from their past which they are forced to address at the end in their own ways. Like all of Piesiewicz’s scripts, he manages to hit that fine line between metaphor and cliche just perfectly, hitting many points with just the right amount of force and making them ring with recognition later in the film. Tanovic directs the film with grace, and the cinematography is wonderful. Here’s hoping this gets a release somewhere down the line, it seems ridiculous that it wouldn’t although in some miscellaneous net wandering I have been surprised to find some pretty negative opinions.

The second film was Someone Else’s Happiness from Belgium. A couple days ago I saw this film in my list and I could not remember a single thing about it. I had to go to the festival website to remember what it was. The film chronicles the events following a hit and run accident in which a young child is killed. I feel like it cheated in the first two thirds by going to great lengths to setup someone as the killer and then later pull the rug out from you. There’s a fine line between misdirection and lying in situations like that and this film crossed it. It strongly reminded me of another film which I am having a hard time placing. The fact that it was so forgettable is a good indication of my opinion of it.