DISCOSALT NYC HALLOWEEN PARTY
Time to dust your wig, trick your treat, reeces your pieces and freak the demons again! The celebrated Discosalt Halloweekend Bash is back by popular demand. This year we are taking over the DCTV Firehouse on Lafayette Street, with live music from Brooklyn’s Team Genius, nihiti, a DJ set from The Surveyor and some special tricks and treats to satisfy your Halloween sweet tooth. The details:
LOCATION: DCTV Firehouse, 87 Lafayette Street (6 Train to Canal Street)
WHEN: 9pm-2pm, Saturday October 30
***OPEN BAR 9pm-2pm***
$20.00 Pre-Order
$25.00 at the door
MP3 AND NEW VIDEO FROM WARPAINT: UNDERTOW
Warpaint’s official video for “Undertow” is the directorial debut from indie girl hottie Shannyn Sossamon (The Rules of Attraction, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang). Shannon, who briefly played drums with the band, is also sister to Bassist Jenny Lee. Grab the free track and watch the video below:
MP3: Warpaint – “Undertow”
NEW VIDEO FROM WOLF PARADE: YULIA
Ground control to Wolf Parade. In the new Scott Coffey directed video for the cinematic “Yulia” off Wolf Parade’s Expo 86, a Soviet astronaut on a secret black mission is rocketed into space leaving behind a woman he may never see again. It’s sort of a Major Tom, Cold War conspiracy style with a nod to Russian cinema. In the song, the protagonist is in a (metaphorical) space away from a woman named Yulia, but is he lost in space forever? Watch the video.
“During the Cold War at the beginning of the Space Age, the Soviet Union was rumored to have two space programs – one a public program, the other a secret ‘black’ one, in which dangerous and sometimes downright suicidal missions were attempted. Cosmonauts would be shot into orbit without the means or resources to get them home, stranded in an expanding orbit around earth, slowly pulling away, frozen in space for eternity. I wanted to create a kind of formal and slightly nostalgic vibe. At the same time, I wanted it to feel untethered to an exact era — not specifically in the past. I shot in Portland Oregon and a little in Romania and I was really inspired by Russian cinema and Communist propaganda posters. It was an ambitious idea and I’m really stoked thatDeschutes Brewery and North were able to help support the production of this video for Wolf Parade’s great song, Yulia.”– Scott Coffey
NEW VIDEO FROM BEST COAST: BOYFRIEND
Southern Cali duo Best Coast serve up some much needed sun drenched pop stylings in their new video for “Boyfriend”, directed by Taylor Cohen. In the video, frontwoman Bethany Cosentino and band mate Bobb Bruno gig a Quinceañera Party and provide the soundtrack for a budding sweet fifteen year old romance. Anyone else have a crush on Bethany or want tacos now?
NEW VIDEO FROM GLASSER: MIRRORAGE
Do you smell scorched engine oil? Glasser’s Cameron Mesirow finds the Black Lodge in the new video for “Mirrorage” directed by Carlos Charlie Prerez. Catch the band in New York all week for CMJ and check out the video below:
NEW VIDEO FROM SHY CHILD: DARK DESTINY
New York’s Electro-pop duo Shy Child pick up the pieces of MGMT’s “Electric Feel”, conjuring Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights Big City on Liquid Love; a post-modern new wave album drenched in enough pulsating 80’s dance beats, lush synth and wispy vocals to make Michael J. Fox self-destruct in comfort. The bittersweet friendship ballad “Dark Destiny”, which comes as a cool-down from the more glitzy, higher energy tracks on the album, leaves us with crooner Pete Cafarella declaring “I’ll keep defending choices you’re making” in a way that is both strangely uplifting and sincere…and makes us want to keep defending choices Shy Child is making. As to what the video has to do with all this, your guess is as good as mine but check it out below:
FRESH NEW WORK FROM THE STUDIO OF MATT W. MOORE
Matt W. Moore has been hard at work in his Portland, Maine studio on a bunch of new projects. His most recent collaboration is with his friend James Chiarelli. 3 hand-painted Telecasters and 9 effects pedals. The Guitars are available completed with Fender standard series necks, Jason Lollar pickups, and vintage style Fender hardware. All of which are hand-painted by Matt in his signature vector style design. Contact for pricing and availability.
Matt has also released volume #1 of his new book series: MWM : Diagonal Thinking. An 88-page softcover book filled with Black & White images, Art, Design, Illustrations, Murals, Graffiti, Patterns, Adventures, Discoveries, and Studio Process.
Q + A: TEAM GENIUS
In the basement of New York’s Mercury Lounge, Discosalt sits down to chew the fat with seven members of the eight piece Brooklyn based musical group Team Genius. We discuss their new and yet to be released second album, the popularity of prime time vampire housewives, Latin pop-rapper Gerardo, Man-Dogs vs. Bears, and the future of Indie Rock.
Team Genius is: Drew Hermiller on vocals and guitars, Chad Hermiller on bass, bells and inspiration, Scottie D on drums and dreams, Emma Firth on vocals, guitar and mandolin, Chris Hudik on bass, Rebekah Allen on Trumpet, Elizabeth Allen on Sax, Keys and somewhere in South America, but with us in spirit, Erin Griffith.
DS: Is there one genius or a team of geniuses responsible for the bands name?
Drew: Hudik. (Chris Hudik, Bass) He was actually naming something else Team Genius. And then, I saw it, and I was like, yeah, that will work. And then, we just used that. At the time, we all pretty much used to play together but we were called Gee Whiz. But there is some old California pop funk group that already has that name and they sent us a “cease and desist”. So, we had to “cease and desist”. And then we were looking out for a new name and Hudick, who wasn’t even in the band at the time, came up with Team Genius.
DS: Where did you all meet and how did you all start playing music together?
Drew: Chad and I are brothers, so we met pretty early on. Rebecca and Elizabeth are sisters. And then lets see…we knew Scott in college. Chad and Scott both ran cross country at Ohio State, so we knew Scott pretty well. And then, Scott moved out here, maybe a year or two years before I did. Then, a month after I moved out here, Chad did. Sometime within the next six months we started kicking around and playing, just as a trio.
Scott: It was essentially a Ramones tribute band.
Chad: It was very Ramones style songs, yeah.
Drew: So, we did that for about a year or so (the trio). Then we started adding in pieces. One of the first pieces we added was Emma, who was friends with Chad’s girlfriend (now wife). And uh, lets see, we added Erin about the same time. She’s been a friend of mine from back home for a really long time. She moved out to New York a couple years after I did; so, that was keys. And then next, we added singer and guitar. And then, we brought in Hudik when he moved out here. And then he was friends with Rebecca and Elizabeth, so we brought them in. I think we brought in Rebecca first and then she brought in Elizabeth. And then we had eight.
DS: Isn’t that how the Brady Bunch got started?
Scott: We’ve been together for like a year and half and we’ve put out an album and a half. And we are working on a new album right now.
DS: Awesome. Are you at liberty to talk about the second album or is it too soon?
Drew: Yeah, we can talk about it. It’s all tracked. We are just basically fooling around with post production and arrangement stuff, and then mixing it. Now, we kind of need to sit down and figure out our business plan with it.
Chad: So actually, we made an EP, then we made the first record, then we made the whole second record; recorded it, mixed it, everything. It was the finished product. And then we decided to shelve it. Then, we just started all over, basically. We took two of the songs from that record and wrote like 9 or 10 more.
DS: Your song “ABC” was recently featured in an episode of “The Gates” which coincidentally airs on ABC. How did that collaboration come about and have you ever seen the Gates? I think it’s like Desperate Housewives that suck blood. So, basically Desperate Housewives.
Drew: We saw the first twenty-eight minutes of it, and then we all shut it off.
Scott: Um, yeah it’s terrible. We have no allegiance to the show. It was a company that someone told me about, so we checked with them. There are big companies that you send stuff too and they submit it to people and it’s basically just business. We sent it to them. They liked it. They took a couple songs, pitched them around and one landed.
Drew: I don’t know how that show is so popular? It’s like weirdly popular!
Chad: I don’t know if it’s REALLY popular?
Elizabeth: Not with you.
Scott: But it goes head to head with Madmen. Who would pick The Gates over Madmen?
[Discosalt is on Team Draper]
DS: You have been credited to a “sophisticated understanding of pop music” in other interviews, which I agree with. Does this come from a sophisticated study of pop music?
Chad: I would say that Drew sophisticatedly studied pop music for a very long time.
Drew: A lot of Beatles and Beach Boys. I didn’t take a class, but yeah. I took some theory in school here and there. And I also um, when I moved to New York, I didn’t really know how to sing, so I took some classes with a guy who graduated from Berkeley up in Boston. He taught me a lot of theory. Basically our classes were like half learning how to sing and the other half was just like a theoretical study of pop music. So, I did learn a lot from him. And then yeah, just a lifetime of listening to like Beatles, Beach Boys, and Stones and kind of moving up through modern music.
Chad: Elizabeth studied music.
Drew: She’s a music teacher!
Chad: Our first album was actually very poppy and on our second one, we went in a lot of different directions and then we realized that…
Scott: ….That kind of sucks?
Chad: We just like to dance and have fun.
Elizabeth: And jump around.
Chad: Jump around and make music, yeah. So this stuff is a lot simpler and a lot more fun.
Rebekah: And Drew’s got a really good ear for hearing the finished product, so he will write and have the shell but he can hear it already done. This is really amazing when we are learning the music.
DS: At what age did you first hear Gerardo?
(An eerie chill of Dead Silence)
DS: Rrrrrrrrico Suave!!? Should we discuss Milli Vanilli instead?
Drew: Oh shit! I remember seeing the video. That was like, what? Nineteen-ninety? Ninety-one? Two? Something like that.
Chad: Did he have like a follow up song?
Scott: Is he still trilling his “r’s” somewhere?
DS: Who are you recording with now? Who would you like to record with?
Drew: Um, anyone talented who will have us. We are recording right now with Eric Xyler from the band Xylos. You may have heard of them? They are popular around town.
Chad: Yeah, we played a couple shows with them. Specifically, we played one here in February. He and I kind of became friends and then, when it came time to start recording the songs we were working on, I just tossed it to him. and was like: ‘would you be interested in producing and recording it?’ Because I know he does a lot of that for his own writing. He was down for it too! Yeah, we’ve been working with him.
DS: Is “While We’re Asleep” an obvious nod to “Oh Yoko”? or is the track similarity completely in my head?
Drew: There’s definitely a similarity there. For sure.
Chad: We used to cover “Oh Yoko” And sometimes we would play them back to back. I think they are both just simple pop songs. Just a bouncy, high vocal, pop song.
DS: All three of your videos seem to have been shot locally in New York. Wondering if we could talk a little about them.
Drew: Did you see the one from when we were Gee Whiz? That’s my favorite.
DS: “I’m Just an idiot”?, yeah. That one is shot in a classroom, which I’m assuming was in New York?
Scott: I might get fired for saying where that was filmed. It was an old school out in Brooklyn and, um and we yeah, we went into it. We had access to it through my job. It didn’t have any electricity
Drew: Your company bought it and were talking about redoing it?
Scott: Allegedly, yeah. So it was in this real cool state of decay and I just always thought it would be a great place to do a video. We drove everybody out there and then realized it didn’t have any electricity, and the sun was going down so the entire video was shot in like 15 minutes.
Drew: Oh my god. Probably like 45 minutes. But yeah it was so rapid. And it was scary being there. Cool though
Scott: There was just like weird dust in there…and shit in the air. Nails coming out of the floor! Paint peeling off!
DS: Who owns the “pube onesie”? Fess up.
Scott: That’s an Adam and Eve costume! I’ve worn that several, several Halloweens. I still have it.
DS: Can I borrow it?
Scott: Absolutely. Let me know when. Seriously, it’s sitting in a closet.
DS: “While We’re Asleep” is shot in an apartment in Park Slope Was someone really moving in the video? or have I been duped by the magic of Hollywood… magic?
Chad: We were moving out that day and decided to shoot the video that day.
Drew: Well, we used to practice there. We had to do it all acoustic because they had neighbors. It was one weird little practice space
DS: Can we clear up some controversy? In the video fro “Take me Home” is the protagonist a bear or a man-dog?
Drew: It’s a bear. It was shot by Iyabo Boyd. She’s a good friend of ours and she’s very talented. We gave her creative license.
Chad: I’m a school teacher and my kids found out about that video and they all thought I was a dog and then I had to hear about it for two months at the end of last school year. Not very fun!
DS: Can you tell us which bar, you and the “man-dog”, I mean “man-bear”, are all playing pool in?
Drew: Oh the bar was our old standby for years. Like when we first moved to New York, we hung out at that bar a lot. So much so, that our friends all moved in above it. The owner of that bar lives above it and our friends lived in that same building. Like, he rented the apt right below them. We were regulars at that bar for like a year. They shut down the whole bar for like a Saturday so we could film that video.
Scott: East village. 7th Street between 1st and 2nd.
DS: Seems you all have really stable other jobs besides playing together. How do you balance it all?
Drew: We practice very little? No, every Monday night we practice.
Chad: I try to keep it as much a secret as I can.
Scott: We all have day jobs that we are passionate and interested in. It’s a little different for us.
Drew: I actually think its more the way more modern music will go, since music is pretty much wholly unprofitably anymore. Its more like, people still have careers and make music because they like it or, you know, when they have time to play because its fun. To me I guess that’s the most honest way to do it. We still like doing it and I love writing tunes with these guys and they love playing them. It’s fun to record with them and if people like it, I’ll assume, you know, that it’s nice to play shows when we can. But the idea that we will sell 500,000 copies and like be on the covers of a bunch of magazines and tour for ten years straight. It’s just not like that. That’s not really reasonable anymore. If you do that in the modern world you still would barely make enough money to pay your rent. And that definitely shapes our music. We are in it to have fun. We enjoy each others company.
Chad: If we got signed by Columbia that would totally be amazing though. Id definitely quit my job.
DS: Do you have a favorite venue to play?
Drew: Probably this one. Mercury Lounge.
Scott: Monkey town before it closed.
DS: If you could play someone elses instrument. Not necessarily functionally in the band, what would it be?
Drew: Drums
Chad: Drums.
Elizabeth: If I knew how to drum I’d play drum
Scott: Id play guitar
Rebekah: I’d play accordion
Chad: Wait, I’d like to be Mick Jagger.
Elizabeth: He does do a good chicken dance!
DS: Who would win in a fight: Team Genius or Team America?
Drew: Probably the puppets?
Chad: 18 inch wooden puppets! We could totally kick their ass!
Drew: Maybe we should cover “America, Fuck Yeah!”?
DS: Do you guys have any favorite indie music blogs?
Drew: I read you guys.
Thanks to Team Genius for a great interview. If you haven’t seen these guys live, do yourself a service and check them out next time they are in town. Also, check back with Discosalt for our full Video interview with the band…coming soon.
DISCOSALT EXCLUSIVE: HOWL DIRECTOR JEFFREY FRIEDMAN
A conversation with Jeffrey FriedmanDirectors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt, Where are We?; The Celluloid Closet and Paragraph 175) give their cinematic take on Allen Ginsberg’s famously confessional, provocative poem in their most recent film, Howl. James Franco stars as the young Allen Ginsberg-poet, counter-culture adventurer, and chronicler of the Beat Generation as he recollects road trips, love affairs, and his search for personal liberation. The result is an incredibly engaging and visually stunning film that is part Beat documentary, part courtroom drama, and part hipster Fantasia meets Pink Floyd’s The Wall.
Discosalt spoke with independent filmmaker /director Jeffrey Friedman about making the film, growing up in a Bohemian upper west side left-wing intellectual family, meeting Ginsberg for the first time, and both the personal and cultural impact of the poem.
DISCOSALT: When did you first discover the poem and what kind of impact did it have on you ?
JEFFREY FRIEDMAN: I read it in high school. I went to a lefty-progressive high school in lower Manhattan, and I spent most of my junior year cutting classes and getting high in the park on the corner or tripping on acid in Central Park. Howl was an anthem of our counter-culture rebellion, passed to me by radical seniors who talked about “Moloch” when referring to “the Man.” I have no idea what I made of the poem, except I knew it was cool, and I knew it was speaking uncompromising and mind-dazzling truth. (Somehow I missed all the queer stuff at that age—amazing what the mind is capable of!)
I was aware of Ginsberg himself, of course: he was a kind of far-off guru figure to me. I encountered him once in person. I was dating a young teenage girl, I was very young myself, maybe 16, bursting at the seams, and my girlfriend came from an esteemed off-off-Broadway theater family. She took me backstage before a performance of Paradise Now, an event featuring Julian Beck and Judith Malina’s troupe of naked or near-naked actors—collectively known as The Living Theater—tripping and high and (as I recall it) running through the audience primally screaming. We joined the cast as they gathered to prepare backstage in a large circle meditating and chanting, led by big-bearded Allen in white Indian attire, Ommmming and chanting and droning his squeezebox. Allen too seemed to be bursting with life. It is startling to think of Allen as the slim, attractive, charismatic young man of 29 who produced “Howl” and hurled it into the world as “an emotional time bomb that would continue exploding in U.S. consciousness.” He seemed to embody youthful rebellion infused with intellectual rigor, social consciousness, and a loving generosity of spirit—all qualities we worked on with James to capture in his character.
DS: What sparked you to revisit the poem and make this film together?
JF: Howl spoke eloquently and passionately about what Allen saw as the dehumanizing militarization of the culture, the rape of the planet, the colonization of our minds by corporate advertising, and the marginalization of dissidence by the psychiatric establishment—among many other themes! Allen responded with “angelic bombs” of verse, joyfully celebrating this precious world into which we have been briefly brought to consciousness, insisting that “everything is holy.”
This time rereading it in conceptualizing the film, I got the queer stuff. (Duh.) Allen’s frank discussion of sexuality—including his own queerness—was revolutionary in 1955 and is still startling today. All the counter-culture movements from the 1960s onwards were foreshadowed in “Howl.”
The counter-culture was my culture. I grew up in a Bohemian upper west side left-wing intellectual family. My father had started a writer’s workshop in Chelsea in the early 1950s, which evolved into a literary magazine called Venture that he edited and published from the time I was 3 until I was 9. (The last issue featured what turned out to be the last interview given by Albert Camus before his untimely death.) My brothers and I lived uptown with my mother, who took classes at Columbia and acted in off-off-Broadway productions, notably at Ellen Stewart’s La Mama Experimental Theatre Club. Weekends my parents ran the coat-check concession at the Village Gate on Bleecker Street, and I would go down there and hear jazz, and especially the new musical revue O, Oysters! (which would evolve into the off-Broadway hit Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris.) There was a diva in that show named Elly Stone who transported me to dizzy heights every time she sang a song translated as Carousel (“We’re on a carousel! / A crazy carousel! / And now we go around / Again we go around / And now we spin around / We’re high above the ground / And down again around! / And up again around! / So high above the ground / We feel we’ve got to yell! / We’re on a carousel! / A crazy carousel!…”)
So somehow it made sense to me when Rob and I found ourselves 40+ years later in the SoHo loft of Tuli Kupferberg. Tuli was 82—the age my father would have been if he had lived another 13 years, and, in his own way, as radical. His politics and my father’s would have been pretty close; I suspect it took my father a little longer to get over his romanticized vision of the Soviet Union, but maybe I think that just because I’m his son and I know about this soft spot. Certainy Tuli embraced the romance of extroverted sexuality as a political tactic in a way my Pop wouldn’t have been altogether comfortable with.
Tuli’s loft was an impressive life-sized maze of makeshift wooden bookshelves, crammed to bursting with books and manuscripts and vinyl records. (Somewhat randomly, Tuli’s friend Thelma Blitz was there, a kindred spirit who had translated the liner notes of Infiniment, a newly released Jacques Brel box set.) Tuli had been mentioned in Howl as one “who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer.” Tuli later become a founding member of The Fugs, a radical rock band featuring poet Ed Sanders. (I read in Tuli’s recent obit that the name of the band was derived from Norman Mailer’s euphemistic spelling of “fuck” in his novel The Naked and the Dead. I saw them perform live once, possibly in Tompkins Square Park, singing their country-rock ballad “I Feel Like Homemade Shit.”) We videotaped Tuli as part of our research for HOWL. He read for us the piece he had written, at Allen’s request, about Tuli’s suicide attempt, which Allen included in the annotated edition of the poem. Tuli also entertained us with his song Go Fuck Yourself With Your Atom Bomb—inspired by a line from Ginsberg’s poem America. (A lot of this stuff will be on the DVD.)
Tuli also introduced us to the work of Eric Drooker, whose New Yorker covers we were familiar with, and whose graphic novels Flood! And Blood Song are wordless poems themselves. Tuli showed us a copy of Illuminated Poems, a Ginsberg-Drooker collaboration featuring Allen’s poems and Eric’s artwork. As Rob and I leaned over the book and turned the pages and came upon a section of Howl, a sudden lightbulb switched on over our heads.
What was the question?
DS: Did filming this movie give either of you a better, changed or different understanding of the poem itself?
JF: Absolutely, every day. I’m still discovering new things in the poem. (As in life, thankfully!)
I grew up on the verse of Dr. Seuss (And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street) and A.A. Milne (“Christopher Robin had wheezles and sneezles, they bundled him into his bed. They gave him what goes with a cold in the nose, and some more for a cold in the head….”) and could recite Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky by heart. I discovered the magic of Shakespeare when I was nine, acting in a children’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But poetry wasn’t my first language; I was far more comfortable with prose. As a teenager I was reading a lot of Zen by way of Alan Watts, and some of the first poems to speak to me deeply were Zen haiku (“Old pond / frog jumps in / splash!” – Basho).
Allen’s Howl seemed to bridge the gap for me between prose and poetry—he was able to play in both worlds, and to find ways of using the energy generated from this back-and-forth to create sparks of feeling and insight. As the language has become more familiar, I’m able to lose myself in the images, meanings have blossomed and become richer. Phrases from the poem float through my consciousness like “winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain.”
DS: Why did you choose to make the film focused on the poem and not film a more traditional biopic on Allen Ginsberg’s life?
JF: That felt too boring and predictable. The poem Howl was—and still is— startling, fresh and liberating: the way it mixes language sacred and profane, the mashup of sexuality and politics and visionary prophecy—how could we approach this with a conventional treatment? It wouldn’t feel right. The poem challenged us to find an audacious approach in the filmmaking. We chose to mix a variety of cinematic styles to build a narrative that would feed into and branch out of the poem itself.
DS: There is a line in the film:“You can’t translate a poem into prose”. But the film attempts to translate, although abstractly, the visual elements of the poem through animation. Were you at all conscious or worried that this choice might receive criticism or detract from an individuals personal experience with the poem?
JF: It’s weird how many people jump on that quote from the trial and try to corner us with it. Honestly, it seems like apples and oranges: we’re not “translating” the poem, we’re interpreting it, or better, adapting it, as we might adapt a novel. In any film adaptation, the filmmakers must make specific concrete choices about events, characters, ambience—everything, really, that readers of a book (or poem) construct in their minds. When we discovered Illuminated Poems, the book that Ginsberg had published in collaboration with artist Eric Drooker, we realized that Allen himself was confident enough in the power of his words that they would only be enhanced by Eric’s striking images. Our concept with Eric was to imagine a dream ride through the poet’s imagination. Obviously, this is our imagined trip, no one else’s. But we wanted to create a cinematic experience, using words and music and images, and invite the audience to drift along with the music of the imagery and experience the poetry in a new and different way. We wanted to offer this as a way to experience the poem from the inside, as it were. Our goal was to view the poem from a multitude of angles: from the perspective of the poet, struggling to make sense of his life by transforming it into art (the “lost” interview); from that of his intended hipster audience (the first presentation of the poem as spoken-word performance in 1955 at the Six Gallery in San Francisco); as well as from that of the Establishment (the obscenity trial, where the poetry is parsed as evidence in a San Francisco courtroom).
DS: The film looks at three different aspects of the poem which are all separated stylistically. What prompted your decision to break the film down this way and which sequences did you film first?
JF: In the re-created interview with Allen (played by James Franco), we wanted to evoke the sense of intimacy and honesty we try for in our documentary interviews. Our models were traditional documentary films from the last half-century, and specifically Portrait of Jason, by Beat filmmaker Shirley Clarke. The framing of these scenes was inspired by the photographs of Ginsberg and his contemporary Robert Frank. These photos were also inspirations for the flashback sequences of scenes from Allen’s earlier life that fed into the writing of HOWL, as was Frank’s invaluable Beat film Pull My Daisy. We were also inspired by jazz—and the free-form jazz-like structure of the Frank film—to use improvisation as a technique in creating the flashbacks. The obscenity trial represented for us the world in which the poem was born, and how that world responded and tried to make sense of it. This was the conformist, conservative world of the 1950s, and we chose to film it in the style of a traditional courtroom drama.
We shot the film in 14 days in New York City in April, 2009. The shooting order is a blur.
DS: Is the poem still relevant or shocking today? What do you think is the poems legacy?
JF: It is still relevant (and shocking) to me. We wanted to introduce the poem and Allen to a new generation, and it seems to us they are responding eagerly. But our film is out there, as is the poem—in its original City Lights collection, as well as a gorgeous new HarperCollins graphic edition featuring Eric Drooker’s artwork from the film—and it’s now up to the audience, and the reader, to experience, interpret and re-imagine.
Continue Reading the full article > Download the Summer 2011 Issue of DISCOSALT MAGAZINE
Howl is currently playing in theaters. Check www.howlthemovie.com for locations near you.
NEW VIDEO FROM CLOUD NOTHINGS: HEY COOL KID
Discosalt Video Of The Week 10/10/10: “Hey Cool Kid” , the debut single from Wichita Recordings newest snot nosed lo-fi pop signings Cloud Nothings, is out 18th October on 7″ and download. The video premise is simple: Nerd creates basketball monster capable of insane zone defense. Monster drops a leg. Scoreboard Melts. Fire. Confetti. It’s a nerd rewrite of Highschool where the nerd gets the attention of the cool kids, defeats the jock and throws his own ticker tape party to celebrate. Check out the video below:
NEW VIDEO FROM MUMDANCE: DON’T FORGET ME NOW
Check out the official first music video from the pun and fruit friendly Mumdance for “Don’t Forget me Now”(feat. Esser), directed by Ben Reed and starring some close relatives of the Mighty Boosh’s Milky Joe. After spending the last two years creating high profile remixes for the likes of Santigold, Gucci Mane, Radioclit and more, Mumdance (aka Jack Adams) is switching his focus to all original productions with the release of his debut EP, Mum Decent. Mumdance’s ability to interwork eclectic vocals by UK crooner Esser and grime MC Badness on top of production that spans continental influence is what ultimately has allowed his work to stand out amongst his peers. The three tracks that make up the Mum Decent EP follow this summer’s outstanding Different Circles mixtape and lay the groundwork for even more original production on forthcoming releases with Bonde Do Role, Toy Selectah, Brodinski and Drums of Death. In the perfect marriage of worldly inspiration and hip influence, Mumdance will be on heavy rotation this fall.
FREE TICKET GIVE-AWAY: THE CHAPIN SISTERS @ THE ROCK SHOP SUNDAY
After celebrating their new release Two, American folk pop duo, The Chapin Sisters Kick off their Fall Tour This Week. Real life sisters Abigail and Lily Chapin will continue to captivate audiences across the US with the same ethereal harmonies and refined musicianship seen throughout the new record and as a special October treat, Discosalt is giving away a pair of free tickets to their show this Sunday in New York at the Rock Shop.
HERE IS HOW TO WIN:
Twitter:
- Log in to Twitter
- Follow @Discosalt on Twitter.
- Find and re-tweet our official contest tweet
- Log in to Facebook
- Like Discosalt Artist Collective on Facebook
- Post “I want to see the Chapin Sisters” on our wall. easy.
Tour Dates:
October
9 New York City – City Winery/John Lennon Birthday Tribute
10 Brooklyn, NY – The Rock Shop NY
12 Portland, ME – One Longfellow Square
13 Providence, RI – The Spot Underground
14 Shelbourne Falls, MA – Mocha Maya
15 Boston, MA – The Red Room @ Cafe 939
19 New York, NY – The Living Room for CMJ music Marathon
24 Vancouver, BC – The Orpheum Theatre (with She & Him)
25 Arlington, VA – IOTA Club & Cafe
27 Charlottesville, VA – Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar
28 Philadelphia, PA – The Tin Angel
29 Annapolis, MD – Rams Head On Stage
30 Arden, MD – The Nightcat
31 Buckhannon, WV – Wesleyan College Mountain Stage
November
1 Pittsburgh, PA – Thunderbird Cafe
2 Ann Arbor, MI – The Ark
3 Kent, OH – The Kent Stage
4 Oberlin, OH – Cat in the Cream Coffeehouse/Oberlin College
5 Cleveland, OH – Beachland Tavern
8 Des Moines, IA – Java Joe’s 4th Street Theatre
9 Zumbrota, MN – Crossings at Carnegie
10 Minneapolis, MN – Dakota Jazz Club
14 Evanston,IL – S.P.A.C.E.
15 Lexington, KY – The Kentucky Theater
16 Louisville, KY – ear X-tacy instore performance
19 Woodstock, NY – Bearsville Theater
30 Bellingham, WA – Green Frog Cafe & Acoustic Tavern
December
2 Portland, OR – Mississippi Studios
NEW VIDEO FROM PISSED JEANS: FALSE JESII PT. 2
Sub Pop‘s Sludgey Punk Noise masters Pissed Jeans may have dropped this ultra low budget music video for the King of Jeans opening track “False Jesii Part 2”, but just don’t expect them to be excited about it. Stepping outside the bands typical rowdy stage performance, they deliver a lackluster performance, taking a dig at the conventional music video. And yes, the drummer is using a slice of pizza and a beer as sticks.
MINITEL ROSE RELEASE SECOND ALBUM: ATLANTIQUE
French electro trio Minitel Rose have teamed up with the legendary K7! Records to release their much anticipated second album Atlantique on the 22nd November. The follow up to their critically acclaimed first album, The French Machine (Futur, 2008) is an interesting affair. The bands love of rock influenced drums and electro synths means that their sound falls between the two genres sounding retro and futuristic at the same time.
Minitel Rose – Wild Birds by Sainted PR
While The French Machine was largely the product of computer technology, we can see the growth in the music of Minitel Rose. Firstly through their experimentation with analog equipment on Atlantique and also through the development of their fantastic stage show. Currently Minitel Rose’s live show consists of a drummer and three live synths. “It’s a real rock gig. We use synths but no computers or tapes. It’s all energy and sweat,” Quentin says.
Minitel Rose have just taught climate change a lesson: only one season is ever worth living. A never-ending summer with a clear blue sky, cradled with Atlantique’s electronic flows.
WHOLPHIN: DVD MAGAZINE OF RARE AND UNSEEN SHORT FILMS
Back in 2005, Dave Eggers and Brent Hoff of McSweeney’s created Wholphin, a quarterly DVD magazine which showcases a selection of short films, documentaries, cartoons and videos which have had little or no exposure elsewhere. The collection includes a really unusual eclectic mix of shorts from Spike Jonze, David O. Russell, Miguel Arteta, David Byrne and a slew of other filmmakers. If you haven’t checked out any of the 15 issues out yet, you can preview two of the shorts below.
This first short starring John C. Reilly “Are You The Favorite Person of Anybody” was directed by Miguel Arteta. Written by Miranda July. From Wholphin Issue No. 1
Selma Blair has an interesting visit with a gynecologist in “The Big Empty” directed by Lisa Chang and Thomas Sigel. Story by Alison Smith from McSweeney’s No 11. From Wholphin Issue No. 1
BAND OF HORSES: INFINITE ARMS PHOTOGRAPHY EXHIBITION
Join Band Of Horses photographer Christopher Wilson and Filter Magazine at the Lomography Gallery Store LA in West Hollywood on Saturday from 5-7pm for a special photo exhibition. The event will showcase the winning photos from the BOH Lomography contest, and those who attend will have a chance to win a pair of tickets to the Greek Theater show. Visit lomography.com for full details!
Christopher Wilson has worked with Band Of Horses as their Artistic Director throughout their career. Not only have Chris’ photographs taken front and center on their most recent release Infinite Arms (as well as all the other Band Of Horses albums!) but they are also projected behind the band at every concert.
RSVP: shopla@lomography.com
Saturday, September 25, 2010; 5:00 – 7:00 pm
Lomography Gallery Store LA
7998 Santa Monica Blvd
West Hollywood, CA 90046
(323) 301.1414
Open Hours
Monday – Saturday: 10:30 am – 9:00 pm
Sunday: 11:00 am – 7:00 pm
NEW VIDEO FROM OK GO: WHITE KNUCKLES
The official music video for OK Go’s prince-esc single “White Knuckles”, directed by Trish Sie keeps the bands video tradition of filming entirely in one shot. So, how does the band attempt to top their previous DIY tongue-in-cheek, choreographed music videos? Trained dogs? Yes, its a big day for dogs in music video’s today. Luckily, these dogs are far less menacing than the ones in Delorean’s “Real Love” video. No band members were mauled in the making of the video, but instead Ok Go have teamed with the ASPCA to raise funds for the Rural Rescue Dog Fund in a possible attempt to quell tensions between dogs and hipsters.
Some other OK Go Videos you may have missed:
NEW VIDEO FROM MOON DUO: KILLING TIME
Discosalt Video of the Week 9/19/10: Video for “Killing Time” from Moon Duo, the soulfully noisy psychedelic space-rock side-project from Wooden Shjips guitarist Erik Johnson and keyboardist Sanae Yamad. Hidden under walls of trippy reverb that recalls Velvet Underground, Suicide, Silver Apples and Spaceman 3, is, as their name suggests (Coltrane and Rashied Ali), an experimental jazz resolve rocketing through outer space. The video directed by Jacqueline Castel finds the duo fittingly trekking across an other worldly landscape.
Check out Moon Duo performing live on KEXP:
STEVE AOKI & ARMAND VAN HELDEN’S NEW SINGLE: BRRRAT!
Steve Aoki and Bostonian DJ Armand Van Helden’s new single “Brrrat!” is out today on Dim Mak Records. Check out a video of Armand Van Helden dropping “Brrrat!” at SW4 mainstage in London UK to over 10,000 people August 29, 2010 with a cameo by Steve Aoki.