August 2003

Portrait of Melissa

Filed under: Imported

Laugh-In

This morning I woke up to a fire alarm (it goes off when the downstairs neighbors smoke), found a $100 ticket on my windshield because my front license plate had fallen off sometime yesterday, and read two attacks on good critics I know, Michaelangelo Matos and Chuck Klosterman, that make me wonder whether I couldn't get freelance work if I just started shitting into a scanner.

So after being a jerk all day, I decided to come up with a few things that make me laugh:

1.) The fictional cyber-chat exploits of one J-Dogg (reprinted in the latest Harper's and archived at Chris's Dumb Page O' Shit). I imagine this guy as Sensational's alter-ego:

J-Dogg: Ok baby, we got to hurry, I don't know how long I can keep it ready for you.
Partner5: Thats ok.  Ok I'm a japanese schoolgirl, what are you.
J-Dogg: A Rhinocerus.  Well, hung like one, thats for sure.
Partner5: Haha, ok lets go.  
Partner5: I put my hand through your hair, and kiss you on the neck.
J-Dogg: I stomp the ground, and snort, to alert you that you are in my breeding territory.
Partner5: Haha, ok, you know that turns me on.
Partner5: I start unbuttoning your shirt.
J-Dogg: Rhinoceruses don't were shirts.
Partner5: No, your not really a Rhinocerus silly, it's just part of the game.
J-Dogg: Rhinoceruses don't play games.  They fucking charge your ass.
Partner5: Stop, c'mon be serious.
J-Dogg: It doesn't get any more serious than a Rhinocerus about to charge your ass.
J-Dogg: I stomp my feet, the dust stirs around my tough skinned feet.
Partner5: Thats it.
J-Dogg: Nostrils flaring, I lower my head.  My horn, like some phallic symbol of my potent virility, is the last thing you see as skulls collide and mine remains the victor.  You are now a bloody red ragdoll suspended in the air on my mighty horn.

2.) This early-'80s picture of Jim Walsh (second from left) and his band Laughing Stock, taken by Daniel Corrigan.

3.) Yesterday, I swear to God, my toilet said, "I know," in a death-metal voice, when I flushed it. I froze. I didn't know what to think. "I know." Christ, what does it know? Was my toilet sympathizing? Or threatening?

4.) My friend Stephanie puts one of her cats in a box when strangers come over, when he just can't deal. The cat likes it in there. His name is written all over the outside, and there's a hole for his tail to stick out, so when she closes it, there's just a box with a tail.

5.) Flying carp as the new killer bees (thanks Mosedale), migrating up the Mississippi and smacking unsuspecting boaters in the face. Mosedale says he thinks that's how he'll die, getting hit by a 50-pound fish.

6.) This picture by Mosedale; Melissa laughing. My forehead reminds me of what my youngest brother used to call my dad, who is bald: the Shining.

7.) From WookieFoot's web site: 2 GIRLS NEED RIDE FROM MADISON, WI  hey, me and my friend were wondering if anyone was goin to harvest fest coming from madison wisconsin or around the area, we'll pay gas money or have other options of payment, but get your mind outta the gutter, we're just two cool stoner chicks looking for a ride and we'll b stoner friendly for sure, please help us out -peace and love-

8.) From the Onion: "No One Makes It to Burning Man Festival"

9.) Kids review music (from Melissa and Keith).

(more to come)

Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at August 28, 2003 6:12 PM

First Avenue's Divorce

Filed under: Imported

While doing interviews for an oral history of the great Minneapolis club First Avenue (running in City Pages September 3), I discovered that the two principle property owners, who have been friends since age 8, are now engulfed in a legal battle. Not good news, as I reported in today's City Pages. But instead of worrying, let's show these guys what a good investment First Avenue is, and support the club as you would any old friend whose parents are divorcing. Bring a few extra pals to the early-evening Liz Phair show tomorrow (Thursday) night, read this review before you do, then stay late and salsa. Hmmmm... why do I suspect there will be women I'm attracted to there?

Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at August 27, 2003 5:14 PM

"All the questions you've had all your life about Bob Dylan are answered in this movie."

Filed under: Imported

 (photo from the Austin Chronicle)

An interview with director Larry Charles

There's a moment, at the beginning of the movie Shakedown, when a cop tells some guy in Central Park, "I hate rap music," referring to a boombox blasting the Red Hot Chili Peppers cover of Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues." Well Masked and Anonymous is like that moment of cultural confusion blown up to epic-movie-length, a hilarious and confounding allegory about Bob Dylan starring Bob Dylan as more or less himself--he's like a wooden muppet among the actors--in an alternate universe of American banana republicanism, and with a soundtrack that features an international selection of Bob Dylan covers. (Here's my full review of the film.)

A week before Greil Marcus plugged this instant-cult-classic in his City Pages column, I publicly joked that I was almost looking forward to his explanation of the movie. That was meant as a playful dig: I REALLY AM looking forward to it. There's no doubting that something intensely personal and significant is being said in this picture. I just wish understanding it didn't seem to depend so heavily on caring about a singer whose iconography never meant much to me. Even fans seem to like Dylan's newer stuff better because it dispenses with his mythos and starts dealing with subjects like mortality and getting old. As my colleague Britt Robson quips, "Dylan's got to shoot out the mirrors on at least three of the four walls before I'll pay attention."

Seeing the movie with my film editor at City Pages, Rob Nelson (who likes the picture as much as I do, and hates it less), I was eager to talk to the other guy behind the film, longtime Seinfeld director Larry Charles (more recently a director on HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm.) To kick off our unpublishable bullshit session at the Harriet Island Inn, a Complicated Fun exclusive interview, I asked him the one question that Jeff Bridges's rock critic, Tom Friend, eventually got around to asking Bob Dylan's Jack Fate character:

So, were you at Woodstock?

I was only 12. My parents lived up in the Catskills, so it was going on all around me. But I was too young to go to Woodstock. Bob wasn't there, either, of course.

The movie seems very concerned with the counterculture.

Yes.

And I assume that's something you care about because you're a part of it.

I am, and I've been a part of it. I've also witnessed first-hand the co-opting of the counterculture and the exploitation of the counterculture, and I think that's one of the main themes of the movie: the twisting of the counterculture for the purposes of the corporate culture. Bob is a symbol of in a lot of ways. He has maintained his integrity, his independence, and his authenticity in the face of this transformation of the counterculture.

I almost felt like the movie could have been made by a real critic of the counterculture. I mean, the revolution is a failure in the film.

I think another theme of the movie is the cycles of history: All countercultures become the prevailing culture. As soon as the new order becomes the established order, it starts to crumble.

Are these themes you've wanted to deal with before, but couldn't?

No, actually I deal with them quite a bit in my work. My most public and successful work may deal with it less. But my proud failures are much more concerned with these issues, the issues of the counterculture and the media and technology, and what role humans play in our present society. These are all issues that I'm very concerned with, that I write a lot about, but by its very nature that work reaches a limited audience.

The more commercial work just reaches a larger audience. But even within that context, a character like Kramer on Seinfeld, for instance, is saying a lot of those things, actually. That's a way to permeate the prevailing culture with some subversive thoughts, through a character's voice. You find different ways of hiding it, so it's not apparent on the surface, so the code is there, if you can crack it.

What were some of your proudest failures?

Well, Michael Moore and I wrote a pilot together for a sit-com about two fired auto workers called Better Days. It was great, it came out great, and CBS loved it, and we started hiring writers. And then suddenly it was over before it began. What happened? Well, GM is the largest advertiser on television, and they saw the pilot, and said we're not going to support anything about fired auto workers done by Michael Moore. So they killed that. It was very radical piece of work that never saw the light of day.

I did an animated show called Dilbert with Scott Adams, who created the comic strip, that really pushed the limits and the boundaries of what the comic got into. We were very much dealing with the issues of technology and the corporate culture. And I did a show a couple years ago called The Tick, which was based on the underground comic. Again, it was dealing with issues of perception and reality and consciousness.

I wouldn't consider Dilbert to be a failure, at least. It's still on Comedy Central in re-runs.

There's a certain ceiling that something has to pop through in order to pervade the culture. Those shows were never given the opportunity to reach that level, like Seinfeld did. Seinfeld could have easily been canceled anywhere along the way. But, through a series of fortuitous circumstances, it survived its initial stages, and reached that mass culture, and changed it in a lot of ways. Dilbert and The Tick never had that chance.

Masked and Anonymous was an opportunity to sort of explore a lot of those same things, and we were able to do it outside of the purview of the corporate culture. This was a movie made entirely outside of the system, and that's why it got made. It never would have survived the system.

"What if I told you about a country where the president was elected illegally, the deciding votes were in a state where his brother was in control, their father was the former president, and before that their father was the head of the secret police?"

You wrote the movie with Bob Dylan, right?

Well it's credited to two men named Rene Fontaine and Sergei Petrov. That's my official story. So any question you have about the writing, I will refer to those two gentlemen.

Well okay, here's my question: Having a black child sing "The Times They Are A-Changing," having a revolutionary regime where the guards are mostly people of color, where the executives of the TV station are mostly black, with a token white, and since Bob Dylan, who stars in this, is so associated with the Civil Rights movement... I didn't come up with a coherent question except, just: What the fuck?

Well that's a fair question [laughs]. We were trying to do a number of things at once. We were trying to juxtapose a number of ideas at one time, and see if these ideas would synthesize into something. This idea of the old order crumbling and the new order taking over, this idea of a Third World America, this idea of factionalism. I spent two years just collecting photographs of different Third World countries, so that there are Asian troops, there are black troops in the movie, there are Hispanic troops, there are Middle Eastern troops. I wanted a sense, like in the Giovanni Ribisi scene, he didn't know what side to be on, he kept on changing sides. Even as he's changing sides, the sides themselves are changing: The revolutionaries are backed by the government, and the government's going to be toppled.

That's the way I see the world: Who's in charge here? Whether you look at Liberia right now, or the Congo, or the United States.

What if I told you about a country where the president was elected illegally, the deciding votes were in a state where his brother was in control, their father was the former president, and before that their father was the head of the secret police. What country am I talking about? I'm talking about the United States. But it could be Columbia or Chile or Liberia. So it's very hard to know where you stand.
The racial issue is being explored on a bunch of different levels. If you notice, the little girl's mother is white.

And the parents forced her to learn the song.

Yes. The ventriloquist is white whose dummy is black. There's all these sort of new order/old order equations being explored racially in this country that we tried to find poetic metaphors for. One of the first things Bob ever told me, when he was a kid there were still minstrel shows that would come through his town. And him being from Minnesota, it's kind of interesting. This idea of white people in blackface. I mean, we have a black-faced character also [played by Ed Harris], this whole idea of white people in black face. That relationship between white and black in this country, which is so volatile, kind of exploding in this strange way, seemed like an interesting area to sort of take advantage of, use, explore, examine, and analyze in some way--but again, not in a heavy-handed way. In a poetic, off-the-nose sort of way.

So how did you approach Dylan with this movie? Did you know him beforehand?

We did not know each other beforehand. He was interested in doing something, he didn't know what. Something in either television or film. He had met with a few people and it apparently it didn't go well. I knew his manager somewhat, and he said, "Would you be interested in talking to Bob about this?"

I said of course, and I thought if I had one meeting with him, I could tell my friends I met Bob Dylan. But when I met him, he had a stack of scrap paper from all around the world that he'd just made his notes on, and he dumped it on the table, and said, "I don't know what to do with this." We started playing with it like a jigsaw puzzle.

What were some of the things on the scrap paper?

Again, this gets into the Rene and Sergei world.

Oh, I'm sorry, Rene...?

Rene and Sergei are the screenwriters.

Oh, yeah. So what did Rene and Sergei find on all those pieces of paper?

They started to examine it, and what Sergei found from Rene's scrap paper were all sorts of thoughts, aphorisms, rhymes, names, without any connection to one another. Slowly Sergei took all this paper that Rene gave him and started to go, well, you can put this together with this, you could put this together with this: Here's a character, here's a story. Suddenly it started to emerge. We did it very much... it was done very much like the William S. Burroughs cut-up technique. We just started to piece it together, and patterns started to emerge out of our subconscious, and slowly that took the shape of a script.

The fact that the movie is about a figure based on Dylan, and the fact that it's a TV situation, will make people think that it's autobiographical.

My wife said to me it's kind of a fictional documentary. And it is. It's also a Vaudeville show and a burlesque and an opera and all those things as well. But the clues are there. It's called Masked and Anonymous. But the clues are there to insights into Bob himself. It's all there for you. You can know everything you need to know about him. All the questions you've had all your life about him are answered or dealt with in this movie. But it's not on the surface. You sort of have to wade into the layers of it, through the music, through the dialogue, through the characters, through the choices. It's all there.

So there's an autobiographical element to it, of course, yes, as I think there is to everything he does. People say Bob Dylan is a mystery, but if you listen to his body of work, you know everything there is to know about him. Everything he wants you to know.

He really doesn't do much acting in the movie. How did you decide to approach directing him? Did you try to get him to act and it didn't work out? Because he's really just being himself.

That's exactly right. I think that to have him play a character would have been squandering the opportunity of having Bob Dylan in a movie. I wanted him to just be. I wanted him to be a primitive in the best sense of the word. I didn't want him to get hung up on technique.

In fact, a few people tried to give him advice about acting prior to the movie, and I just stripped all that away from him. I didn't want him to have technique. In fact the only person who was really helpful in terms of pragmatic choices to make in these scenes was Jeff Bridges. He was extremely generous with Bob, and kind of helped guide him a little bit. But basically I just wanted Bob to be. I felt like if I could just get that face on camera, that face will speak volumes. His silence will speak volumes. He didn't need to have a lot of lines.

I kind of saw him as a post-apocalyptic Clint Eastwood or Humphrey Bogart, just laconic and iconic at the same time. I felt like that's all you need. That's the power of him. Just tap into that power, tap into that charisma, tap into that energy, and you'll have a tremendous performance, a unique performance. That's what I was trying to do.

I have to admit, I've been listening to Dylan's music my whole life, but not as a fan. Is most of the music that he recorded for the movie specifically for this movie?

Everything he did in the movie was shot live for the movie. We had discussed doing six songs live. We shot on digital video, so when we got to the days that we actually shot the music--this was my plan all along--I just kept the cameras going. I got the six songs, but I also got 20 other songs.

What happened was that sometimes he'd be warming up or rehearsing something in order to get ready to play the song he was supposed to do, and it was so amazing that I said, let's shoot that too. "Dixie" was like that. I thought, this a perfect song for this movie. Again, the black and white, the Civil War, the perception of the song as being about one thing, but really coming from another source. People don't realize that "Dixie" was written by freed Northern slaves as a nostalgic song about the South. It was perceived as a song that touts the Confederacy. So it's a very misunderstood song.

One of the great conversations between Rene and Sergei that I like to tell people is, while they were working on the script, Rene suggested a line for the script and Sergei said, well listen, even in this script, that line doesn't make any sense. And Rene said in his inimitable style: What's so bad about being misunderstood?

In a sense that's the risk that we take in the movie. And that's the risk that Bob takes as an artist. You have to risk misunderstanding if you want to reach a deeper level of understanding.

What was the line in question?

I don't remember what line it was. There were so many of them.

I wasn't at Sundance but I heard the reception was really hostile. How did you react to that? How did Bob Dylan react to that?

First of all, I know that people think that, but my experience was not that at all. What happened was, on opening night, we had all the great actors show up, we had a crazy media mob scene. There may have been some backlash to that, on some level. There was a hype for it. We didn't realize it would get into that kind of frenzy. Jeff Gilmore, the head of Sundance, was extremely supportive of the movie. We premiered it at the biggest theater at Sundance, and then we played it two more times there.

The response that I got from the audience was fantastic. I would walk down the street and be besieged by people who wanted to talk about it. Crowds who wanted to ask the kind of questions you're asking, who wanted to debate and give their interpretation, and ask me my interpretation. Even if they hated it, they felt strongly about it.

What happened was there were three reviews, and those three reviews caught me by surprise. These were three reviewers just did not make any effort to engage with the movie at all, just dismissed it on the surface, and were extremely nasty about it. I think that colored the perception of the Sundance experience.

"I remember afterwards Andy Kaufman saying, 'I don't know what I'm going to do now. What do I do next?' We said: You have to stage your own death. And he's like, 'Yeah, that's what I'm going to do.'"

I would think that people writing about movies are disproportionately from the '60s counterculture. Yet it seems that movies like this get slammed harder than others.

Keep in mind the system for moviemaking today and how it works. The studio is owned by a large conglomerate. The people who write the reviews, like Hollywood Reporter and Variety, those are trade papers. Their job is to promote studio product.

Even Roger Ebert, at this point, is somebody who works for a company, and they all understand what they're supposed to do. They're all part of the same system. They're there to promote studio product. That's what movie reviewing is today, thumbs up, thumbs down. It's not a serious discussion of film. That doesn't exist anymore.

Well here's a movie that was made outside of that system. It has to be crushed. It can't be allowed to succeed by the system because it'll show the cracks in the system.

But it's playing at Landmark Theatres.

Because Sony Classics had the courage to pick it up. Because they see it as having some potential in the marketplace. But that's the extent of it.

How did you get all these A-list actors to be in one movie?

Bob Dylan was the initial lure. The idea of working with Bob Dylan was very exciting to a lot of people. The second thing was this amazing script. People really responded to the script: the roles, the language, the themes. The third thing was I'm a very good closer. I came in and sat down with these actors, and was able to say to them, in lieu of money, I'm going to provide you with a creative experience that you're not going to get anywhere else.

Watching the Jeff Bridges character, it made me wonder whether some of the hostility to the movie might not be its portrayal of critics. I mean, Bob Dylan is now a mainstream figure again, and critics absolutely adore him--

But that's the key. He's been touted as the new messiah. He's been excoriated. He's been publicly humiliated. He's been publicly lionized. He knows the vagaries of critical reaction. He is in a good critical period right now, until this movie, actually.

But he knows it's temporary. It's only a matter of time before they take off on him again. So he's had a very ambivalent relationship with the media, and that's portrayed in the movie. He's had a unique relationship with the media. I mean, he's not somebody who you just ask questions, like you're asking me. People want to know the meaning of life from him. And a lot of journalists want to show him that they "get it."

I've seen Bob in those situations. Bob will not respond, and leaves the journalist twisting in the wind.

Do you consider yourself disillusioned with the 1960s counterculture? I mean, a lot of people would say that the revolution didn't fail. It just permeated and dissipated, like your example of Kramer on Seinfeld.

Well, George Bush is in power, and that's not the counterculture. I just came from Dallas, where the first coup d'etat took place, where they killed Kennedy. This government is a government by coup d'etat, as far as I'm concerned. So the counterculture has been turned on its head and used against itself. That's one of the many ironies of the movie. There's a where John Goodman says to Bob Dylan, here are all the songs you have to sing, and he lists all these famous protest songs.

Well all these protest songs are owned by large companies. They're not really protest songs. A group like the Sex Pistols, they were destroyed because they really were revolutionary. But "Eve of Destruction," it's on classic rock. It's not a scary song. And Bob recognizes that these songs, and even his own songs, are in danger of this at all times, of being co-opted, and turned around, and used to promote the very thing that it's speaking against.

Until you have Mickey Rourke take over?

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

What else are you working on?

Curb Your Enthusiasm. I'm flying back to finish these ten shows, and I don't know whether we do more after that. It's up to Larry David, whether he still feels inspired enough to do another season. But again, that's a very radical show in a way, dealing with very outrageous concepts, the limits of social behavior.

I always thought of Seinfeld as a celebration of smallness. And Curb Your Enthusiasm goes so much farther in making the Larry David character really unlikable.

While at the same time compelling. I've always believed that the concept of likeable is overrated. J.R. was a dislikable character who was compelling. Larry David's the same way. Even though Seinfeld is a show about nothing, I always told people that it was a show about everything. It was an easy tag line for it to be a show about nothing.

How did you get into this business?

I was going to NYU Film School for one semester and didn't finish. I got really bored with the whole thing, and decided to move out to California and find my fame and fortune. I didn't know anybody. I didn't know what I really wanted to do. I wrote some jokes, and stood in front of the Comedy Store like a drug dealer. When comedians would come by that I recognized, I'd try to sell them a joke.

It happened to be at a time when this comedy boom was happening. There were all these comedians there and they started buying my jokes. Some of these comedians got to be famous, they got on TV shows, they hired me onto TV shows, I became a television writer. There was no real career path. It was just following my instincts and doing interesting work and working with interesting people. One of those people was Larry David. And years later when he was doing Seinfeld he was like, come on, come do the show with me, we'll do 13 episodes, make some money, and then we'll go back to our regular lives.

The first show that I wrote for was much earlier, when I first met Larry David, it was a show called Fridays, which was a live show from Los Angeles.

I watched that as a kid.

Well I was a kid writing on the show. I was 22 years old. And I had this great experience with that. We had the Clash on and all these cool groups. My last job before being a TV writer was being a bellhop, so it was a real cultural shift for me.

The two moments I remember on Fridays were the Clash [live] and Andy Kaufman [going off script and fighting with cast members]. Were you there when all that happened?

Yes, I was very much a part of that. It was very exciting, actually. It became very clear that we were going to do something really radical. And Andy was a really radical guy. He was just an amazing, unique individual. And the thing I remember most about it, we were trying to pick the sketch that he would break out in, and all that kind of stuff. I was involved in that meeting. For some reason I was there when we made this decision.

But we used to have a party after the show, and I remember afterwards him saying, "I don't know what I'm going to do now. What do I do next?"

And we said: You have to stage your own death. He's like, "Yeah, that's what I'm going to do."

It was three or four of us talking to him. We thought it was a great idea. And then a year later he died, and it was like, "Shit, he's not dead. This is part of the joke." I think a lot of people believed that, because Andy's the kind of person that could have pulled it off.

Speaking of the Clash, Joe Strummer was one of another of those people that other people look to for the meaning of life.

Yes, absolutely, and you know something, he had it, too. In the same way that Bob does. They have this kind of innate wisdom that you can really draw on.

The Clash increasingly did not have the answers.

Well what happens is that you increasingly don't want to have the answers. You want the new questions. That's how Bob is, too. Because the answer's kind of an illusion. The minute you have the answer, it's no longer relevant.

Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at August 26, 2003 7:25 PM

Dylan's new movie: blackface and tequila

Filed under: Imported

From my forthcoming City Pages film review of Masked and Anonymous, which opens Friday, September 5, at Landmark's Lagoon Cinema in Minneapolis:

Masked and Anonymous is a bomb, but it's a spectacular, beautiful bomb. It's the story of Jack Fate, a Bob Dylan figure played, appropriately enough, by Bob Dylan, who walks through the movie with all the expressiveness of a blinking oak tree. Dylan also wrote the hilarious, non sequitur dialogue that swirls around him in the mouths of an unlikely, red-carpet cast (Luke Wilson, Angela Bassett, Val Kilmer, Christian Slater, Penelope Cruz, etc., etc.). But I'm no Dylan fan, and the movie still got to me, maybe because Dylan fans constitute a generation, maybe because I care more about Dylan fans than I care about Dylan.

The movie imagines a surreal Third World America guarded with rifles at every fence, mired in civil war, but still decadent enough to keep the TV shows running on time. It's the U.S. as Liberia--Big Brother is drinking tequila--with a Tropicalia twist. Like 1960s Brazil, the regime lets national TV air the counterculture. The result is the movie's best joke: Jack Fate is sprung from political prison by his old manager, a greasy John Goodman, to do a prime time concert, and Goodman rattles off a list of possible songs--"Won't Get Fooled Again," "Eve of Destruction," "Kick Out the Jams," "Revolution," "Street Fighting Man"--all of them as ridiculous and impotent in this context as they are on real-life classic rock. As the regime's publicist, Jessica Lange wants to know who the fuck would want to watch Jack Fate, anyway. Goodman heaves against his ruffled tuxedo shirt and sweet-talks, but she's not buying. "I can't believe you're going to turn this disaster into a seduction," she says.

"Is this room bugged?" he says.

At the screening of Masked and Anonymous, I leaned over to my editor and asked, "Is this a Hal Hartley movie?" "No, but it might be a Dennis Hopper movie."

The film smacks of 1971, alright, not a year earlier or later. It has that freshly disillusioned feel. The rebels, we learn from Giovanni Ribisi's soldier, no longer know which side they're fighting for. The regime is made up of white hippies in suits, its muscle uniformly men of color. Conceived by Dylan and director Larry Charles, Masked and Anonymous might be a self-lacerating parody of the counterculture as establishment. But it's diffuse: Try parsing, in two hours, a fearless leader who resembles Stalin, a successor played by Mickey Rourke, a cameo by Mark E. Smith of the Fall, jokes at the expense of banjo players, and Dylan delivering the line, "Sometimes it's not enough to know the meaning of things... You have to know what things don't mean as well."

Masked and Anonymous offers us the potent confusion of a little black girl singing "The Times They Are A-Changing" (surprisingly, it's missing from the soundtrack recording), with the accompanying revelation that she was forced to learn it by her white mother; a white ventriloquist whose dummy is black; Ed Harris in blackface; and Jeff Bridges as an interviewer who never asks a question, but harangues Jack Fate with an awed yet condescending take on Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock: "You could hear the tears in every note: 'Love me, love me, I am a native son.'" Dylan's heartfelt live rendition of "Dixie" puts the anthem of the Confederacy in the mouth of a Civil Rights troubadour.

At a recent interview with the director, I find myself reduced to the old journalistic chestnut: "What the fuck?"

To which Larry Charles replies: "That's a fair question."

Charles is an interesting guy. He got his start writing for the live TV sketch show Fridays, L.A.'s answer to Saturday Night Live, and was present when they decided ahead of time to have Andy Kaufman go off script. He directed Seinfeld, working with writer Larry David, and continues the collaboration with HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm. You can imagine Charles being Kramer to David's Jerry: The director is a died-in-the-hemp freak who believes GM smothered his CBS pilot with writer Michael Moore. (Here's the full Q&A.)

"Dixie," he explains, was written by freed Northern slaves as a nostalgic song about the South. It's been misunderstood, much like his collaborator in the movie, whom he discouraged from acting in any fashion.

"Basically I just wanted Bob to be," says Charles. "I felt like if I could just get that face on camera, his silence would speak volumes."

Every question you've had all your life about Bob Dylan is answered in this movie, Charles says. Which might be why Masked and Anonymous is a bomb. Nobody's looked to this particular icon for answers since at least his last fiction film, 1978's Renaldo and Clara. If there is a vacuum at the center of the picture, it's that I know all too well what it doesn't mean.

A Minutemen Compilation Tape: "Shit You Hear At Parties"

No reason for this other than I had 20 minutes to spare, had scribbled it at home, plus I've just been using that part of my brain putting together the upcoming City Pages oral history on First Avenue, and my friend Jon Dolan turns 30 today (I think), and maybe I just wish I could blast this tape with him right now. Haven't worked out what length it'll fit on, but I'll modify when I do, maybe throw on some more tunes. Viva Watt! Party with me punker! Cheers, Jon!

Shit You Hear at Parties (remix)

No Parade

Definitions

Search

Anxious Mofo

Paranoid Chant

Dreams Told By Moto

West Germany

Joe McCarthy's Ghost

Bob Dylan Wrote Propaganda Songs

Spillage

Joy

Maybe Partying Will Help

Fake Contest

Nothing Indeed

Political Straightjacket

The Glory of Man

Cohesion

The Punch Line

The Product

Toadies

The Toe Jam

Take 5, D.

Cut

Black Sheep

The Struggle

Working Men Are Pissed

This Ain't No Picnic

Party With Me Punker

History Lesson - Pt. II

The Anchor

Jesus and Tequila

Take Our Test

Corona

I Felt Like a Gringo

My Heart and the Real World

What Is It?

No, No, No to Draft and War (live)

Joe McCarthy's Ghost (live)

Little Man With a Gun in His Hand (Double Nickels LP version)

Static

Love Dance

Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at August 26, 2003 3:05 PM

 

Jack Grisham: The Joe Pesci-Tommy DeVito of punk-rock politicians

Filed under: Imported

California has had at least one governor who went on to fund and promote torture (Ronald Reagan--I knew some of his Central American victims). But has the state ever seen a candidate who actually admitted to practicing torture?

Here's TSOL frontman Jack Grisham in the book We Got the Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of L.A. Punk, by Marc Spitz and Brendan Mullen, before he announced that he would be joining Gary Coleman and Arnold Schwarzenegger in a bid to replace Gray Davis:

I was torturing this guy in the garage of my mom's house in this nice suburban neighborhood with my whole family inside eating Easter dinner... and I'd got this guy tied up in the rafter with a rope around his legs and I'm beating him with a two-by-four. I said, "Hang on a minute," and put the two-by-four down and walked into the house and kissed my aunt and said like, "Oh hi, how you doing?" I grabbed a deviled egg, told them I'd be back in a minute, and I went back out, grabbed the two-by-four, and kept workin' on the guy. I finally had to get out of Vicious Circle 'cause of the violence. There were constant stabbings and beatings and people cruising by my house at night, shooting up the neighborhood....

I did something pretty bad to somebody and they retaliated with guns. It was a big deal, I had to split to Alaska for a while, they cut the lines on my car, blew up my car... fuck...I don't wanna say who they were, but they weren't punks... boy, they were pissed off.

 

Twin Cities Celebration of Hip Hop: Now I'm a believer

It was Sunday at dusk when it hit me. I was watching local breakdancer Daylight (formerly of the Battlecats) flipping a four-year-old b-boy around his body as the spray paint fumes wafted off the outside wall of Minneapolis's Intermedia Arts, and Camp Lo provided the beat onstage. The little kid had been doing headstands (not quite headspins) on the concrete with another little kid surrounded by cheering adults from all walks of hip-hop life, many from around the country. A dreadlocked out-of-towner named (I believe) Dual the Prophet from (I believe) Ohio won the MC battle earlier that day, though everyone thought it was a toss-up between him and local contender Zach Combs from Interlock and Kanser (a regular at the Loring Pasta Bar MC battles on the third Monday of every month--check it out tonight). The sanctioned graffiti on the walls had gone from murky (in some cases) to brilliant in just the few final hours of work. When the sun was still bright, the C.O.R.E. (here's more on them) had set off a real mosh pit, kicking up a cloud of dust in the air, but that was as hectic as anything got. Now the Circle of Discipline staff were starting to loosen up. They had a huge crowd for two days and it turned out everything went great. No problems that I heard of. Great press had helped (you can tell I've been busy, as I had nothing to say about it on this web site). In other words, the 2nd Annual Twin Cities Celebration of Hip Hop was a success. But it was something more: proof that people really can do it themselves in Minneapolis, without need of alcohol, without clubs, without major promoters or the industry or Rolling Stone coverage. From now on, when I think of hip hop in 2003, I'm going to think of that 4-year-old with the bad-ass moves.

(To add your own highlights and read more, go to the D.U. Nation message board.)

One lingering question from the conference: What was with all the Krispie Kremes? Did the C.O.R.E. get some kind of sponsorship deal from this article?

Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at August 18, 2003 11:53 AM

 

News from the Minneapolis music-media mafia: In

Filed under: Imported

News from the Minneapolis music-media mafia:

In the past eight weeks:

Lost Cause publisher Mark Baumgarten (above) moved to Portland to become music editor at the Willamette Week. City Pages contributor Michaelangelo Matos moved from Manhattan to Seattle to become music editor of the Seattle Weekly, where his first act was to fire columnist Richard Meltzer. (Matos is in direct competition with Jennifer Maerz, music editor at The Stranger, and sister of City Pages music editor Melissa Maerz.) Former Stranger editor Jennifer Vogel accepted an offer to return to City Pages this September after David Schimke announced he'd switch from managing editor to senior writer. Former Minneapolitan Mike Wolf was hired as Time Out New York's music editor. Laura Sinagra managed to stay in the Village Voice film section despite recent layoffs and shrinking text space. (Check out Christgau's Sam Cooke piece to see what you'll be missing when the 900-word limit is imposed.) Former City Pages music editor Keith Harris moved back to Minneapolis (yesterday) after leaving The Chicago Reader. Jim Walsh announced yesterday that he is leaving the St. Paul Pioneer Press to return to... City Pages.

It all feels very 1991. Everyone in my life is either in free-love mode or broke, a guy named George Bush is in the White House, A Tribe Called Quest are back together, Steve Perry is editor of City Pages, Jane's Addiction are on TV. All I need now is to get laid off and it'll be perfect!

Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at August 9, 2003 6:22 PM

 

Scenes from Curtiss A's basement:

Filed under: Imported

Scenes from Curtiss A's basement:

 

"If the world was filled with guys like me, there wouldn't even be roads. If there were, they'd be dirt."

 

 

 

 (photos by Daniel Corrigan)

 

 

Down with Fringe Festival buttons:

 

Email from Sarah Sawyer:

 

The buttons sold by the Fringe Festival are odious, clumsy, annoying, self-congratulatory and..well, mostly just annoying.  I walked up to the counter, not once, but twice.  Said "How much are tickets" they said "$10." I plunk a 10 down and they say "Do you have a button?  you have to buy a button"  I say "I dont' want a button"  They say " You have to have it to get into fringe events." I say "I dont' want to go to fringe events, I've gone to fringe events for the last howeverthehell many years and I'm delighted not to HAVE to go this year...I only want to see this show."

 

"You have to have a button to get into the show.  And- you'll be supporting the fringe"

"I bought a ticket, that should get me into the show.  And I've been supporting fringe theater every day of my life for the last ten years.  I worked for all these same people, for free, before anyone ever even went to the BLB, and I can't even get a smile or a hello in that damned place, I'm done supporting fringe theater"

You need a button.

 

RIGHT- so I bought their damned button even though I was so annoyed with them that I'm shaking.

 

Why not just say "Tickets are $13 for the first show, and $10 for each subsequent show."  Then I'm not shaking.

 

THen, if you're not wearing your stupid button, they harass you.

 

Seriously, the buttons gotta go!

 

-- SKS

 

Second email from Sarah:

feeling a little guilty for saying "I'm done supporting fringe theater" cause of course, I'm not. I"m just pissed off about the fucking buttons.

Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at August 7, 2003 12:03 PM

 

Open letter from Jim Walsh: Make Oct. 25th Paul and Sheila Wellstone World Music Day

Filed under: Imported

 (photo by Terry Gydesen)

I am standing in the northwest corner of Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis, in front of a silver monument that looks like a heart, a broken heart really, and I am thinking about how wrong the world has gone, how Minnesota Mean it all feels. I'm thinking about how much everyone I know misses the man I've come to visit, how sick I am of sitting around waiting for change, and about what might happen if I ask you to do something, which is what I'll do in a minute.

Like most Minnesotans, I met Paul Wellstone once. It was at the Loring Playhouse after the opening night of a friend's play. He and Sheila were there, offering encouragement to the show's director, Casey Stangl, and quietly validating the post-production festivities with his presence: The Junior Senator from Minnesota and his wife are here; we must be doing something right.

The year before (1990), I'd written a column for City Pages encouraging all local musicians and local music fans to go vote for this mad professor the following Tuesday. He won, and, as many have said since, for the first time in my life I felt like we were part of something that had roots in Stuff The Suits Don't Give A Shit About. That is, we felt like we had a voice, like were getting somewhere, or like Janeane Garofalo's villain-whupping character in Mystery Men, who memorably proclaimed, "I would like to dedicate my victory to the supporters of local music and those who seek out independent films."

After the election, Wellstone's aide Bill Hillsman told me he believed my column had reached a segment of the voting populace that they were having trouble reaching, and that it may have helped put him over the top. I put aside my bullshit detector for the moment and chose to believe him, just as I choose at this moment to believe that music and the written word can still help change the world.

When I introduced myself to Wellstone that night as "Jim Walsh from City Pages," he broke into that sexy gap-toothed grin, clasped my hand and forearm and said, with a warm laugh, "Jiiiiim," like we were a couple of thieves getting together for the first time since the big haul. I can still feel his hand squeezing my forearm. I can still feel his fighter's strength.

For those of you who never had the pleasure, that is what Paul Wellstone was--a fighter-despite the fact that the first president Bush said upon their first encounter, "who is this chickenshit?" He fought corporate America, the FCC, injustice, his own government. He fought for the voiceless, the homeless, the poor, the little guy-in this country and beyond. He was a politician but not a robot; an idealist, but not a sap, and if his legacy has already morphed into myth, it's because there were/are so few like him. He was passionate, and compassionate. He had a huge heart, a rigorous mind, a steely soul and conscience, and now he is dead and buried in a plot that looks out over the joggers, bikers, rollerbladers, and motorists who parade around Lake Calhoun daily.

Paul and Sheila Wellstone and six others, including their daughter Marcia, were killed in a plane crash on October 25, 2002. I remember where I was that day, just as you do, and I don't want to forget it, but what I want to remember even more is October 25, 2003. So here's what we're going to do.

We're going to start something right here, right now, and we're going to call it Paul and Sheila Wellstone World Music Day. It will happen on Saturday, Oct. 25th.  On that day, every piece of music, from orchestras to shower singers, superstars to buskers, will be an expression of that loss and a celebration of that life. It will be one day, where music-which, to my way of thinking, is still the best way to fill in the gray areas that the blacks and whites of everyday life leave us with-rises up in all sorts of clubs, cars, concerts, and living rooms, all in the name of peace and love and joy and all that good stuff that gets snickered at by Them.

Now. This is no corporate flim-flam or media boondoggle. This is me talking to you, and you and I deciding to do something about the place we live in when it feels like all the exits are blocked. So: First of all, clip or forward this to anyone you know who still cares about grass roots, community, music, reading, writing, love, the world, and how the world sees America. If you've got a blog or web site, post it.

If you're a musician, book a gig now for Oct. 25th. Tell them you want it to be advertised as part of Paul and Sheila Wellstone World Music Day. If you're a shower singer, lift your voice that day and tell yourself the same thing. If you're a club owner, promoter, or scene fiend, put together a multi-act benefit for Wellstone Action! (www.wellstone.org). If you're a newspaper person, tell your readers. If you're a radio person, tell your listeners. Everybody talk about what you remember about Wellstone, what he tried to do, what you plan to do for Wellstone World Music Day. Then tell me at the email address below, and I'll write another column like this the week of Oct. 25th, with your and others' comments and plans.

This isn't exactly an original idea. Earlier this year, I sat in a room at Stanford University with Judea and Michelle Pearl, the father and daughter of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was kidnapped and murdered by members of a radical Islamic group in Pakistan in February of last year. After much talk about their son and brother's life and murder, I asked them about Danny's love of music. He was a big music fan, and an accomplished violinist who played with all sorts of bands all over the world. Unbeknownst to me at the time, Pearl was also a member of the Atlanta band the Ottoman Empire, and his fiddle levitates one of my all-time favorite Irish jigs, "This Is It," which I found myself singing one night last fall in a Sonoma Valley bar with a bunch of journalists from Paraguay, Texas, Mexico, Jerusalem, Italy, and Korea.

The Pearls talked with amazement about the first Daniel Pearl World Music Day (www.danielpearl.org), the second of which happens this October 10th, which would have been Pearl's 40th birthday. I told them about attending one of the first Daniel Pearl World Music Day activities at Stanford Memorial Church, where a lone violinist silently strolled away from her chamber group at the end, signaling to me and my gathered colleagues that we were to remember that moment and continue to ask questions, continue to push for the dialogue that their son and brother lived for. I vowed that day to tell anybody within earshot about Daniel Pearl World Music Day, and later figured he wouldn't mind a similar elegy for Wellstone, who shared Pearl's battle against hate and cynicism.

Wellstone didn't lead any bands, but he led as musical a life as they come. He lived to bring people together, to mend fences: Music. When he died, musicians and artists were some of the most devastated, as Leslie Ball's crest-fallen-but-somehow-still-beaming face on CSPAN from Williams Arena illustrated. Everyone from Mason Jennings to Larry Long wrote Wellstone tribute songs in the aftermath, and everyone had a story, including the one Wendy Lewis told me about the genuine exuberance with which Wellstone once introduced her band, Rhea Valentine, to a crowd at the Lyn-Lake Festival. Imagine that, today.

So ignore this or do whatever you do when your "We Are The World" hackles go up. I'd be disappointed, and I suppose I wouldn't blame you; in these times of terror alerts and media celebrity, I'm suspicious of everything, too. But I freely admit that the idea of a Wellstone World Music Day is selfish. That day was beyond dark, and to have another like it, a litany of hang-dog tributes and rehashes of The Partisan Speech and How It All Went Wrong, would be painful, not to mention disrespectful to everything those lives stood for and against.

No, I don't want anyone telling me what to think or feel that day, or any day, anymore. I want music that day. I want to wake up hearing it, go to bed singing it. I want banners, church choirs, live feeds, hip-hop, headlines, punk rock, field reports, arias, laughter. I want to remember October 25, 2002 as the day the music died, and October 25, 2003 as the day when people who've spent their lives attending anti-war rallies and teaching kids and championing local music and independent films got together via the great big antennae of music and took another shot.

I am standing in the northwest corner of Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis. In front of the silver broken heart, three workers stab the fresh sod with shovels and fumble with a tape measurer. Flowers dot the dirt surrounding the statue base. I pick up a rock and put it in my pocket.

The sprinklers are on, hissing impatiently at the still-stunned-by-last-autumn citizens who work and hope and wait and watch beyond the cemetery gates. The sprinklers shoot horizontal water geysers this way and that. They are replenishing patches of grass that have been browned by the sun. They are telling every burned-out blade to keep growing, and trying to coax life out of death.

Jim Walsh is a Minneapolis-based writer. He can be reached at walshjim@earthlink.net

Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at August 5, 2003 4:39 PM

 

Editorial cartoonist Pete Wagner on

Filed under: Imported

Editorial cartoonist Pete Wagner on City Pages in today's Minnesota Daily:

It is no longer in any way an alternative newspaper and hasn�t been for a long time. It is merely another corporate rag which panders to vapid bar-slogs and clawing subcultural wannabees who are so devoid of any social, cultural or political consciousness they don�t even qualify as nihilists, much less progressives. And it has a long history of doing so in the most hypocritical way possible, on the backs of underpaid workers systematically terrorized by unwarranted surprise firings, under the thumb of an unbroken string of all-white, all-male editors in chief ever since its inception. At least the Pioneer Press is honest about its corporate nature, and has, unlike City Pages, had women editors � and for the present at least, unions.

Note from Pete: City Pages has had one or more female editors the entire six years I've worked here, since 1997, when Monika Bauerlein was the interim editor in chief.

Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at August 4, 2003 2:07 PM

 

You gotta check out the Atomic

Filed under: Imported

You gotta check out the Atomic Midnights movies at St. Anthony Main Theater if you're in Minneapolis. Drive-in exploitation cinema at its finest. This Saturday's flick from 1972, Terror House (reviewed in this week's City Pages by trash-movie beat critic Joseph Golden) is about a naive young co-ed who accepts a "free vacation" over the phone and ends up at a cannibalistic bed-and-breakfast where she's breakfast!

Next week's movie (on August 10; here's Joe's hilarious review) is even kinkier: Swinging Wives, a.k.a. The Swinging Housewives, a.k.a. Der Neue heiße Sex-Report: Was Männer nicht für möglich halten is a (dubbed) German work of faux sexology that's even more fraudulent, spectacular, leering, and guffaw-inducing than the American book The Velvet Underground from which the band took its name. Prosit!

Don't worry if you haven't heard about any of this yet: So far as I know, the only media promoting Atomic Midnights at the beautifully refurbished theater by the river are City Pages and Earl Root, the headbanger-of-all-trades whose Root of All Evil radio show on KFAI airs during the movies in question. Speaking of Root, he happens to be the subject of a hilarious profile by in this week's City Pages by Paul Demko in anticipation of Root's giant rock blowout concert at First Avenue and the 7th St. Entry on Sunday. If you like the movies, chances are you'll like this concert.

Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at August 1, 2003 3:01 PM

 

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