Band of Lonely Outsiders (pt.1?)

Alone as usual, I went to the movies this past weekend, in perhaps one of the best sanctuaries for cinephiles everywhere--Greenwich Village in Manhattan. The IFC Center, which was once the famous Waverly Theatre before it closed 7 years ago, regularly hosts film festivals, screening some of the most bold, and theatre-chain unfriendly, productions in contemporary independent cinema. And by "independent," I do not mean to include the Junos, Garden States, or even the Little Miss Sunshines of a contemporary "Hollywood-in-Indie's-Clothing" cinema (If you ask me, there's a current trend in Hollywood moviemaking that undermines genuine independent filmmaking, but that's for another blog). By "independent," I mean cinema that does not, like the above "independents," strive for a DIY feel through big studio means, but cinema that is DIY, from the moment it is conceived as an idea on a wrinkled, coffee-stained sheet of paper, carried everywhere inside the pocket of some dude from some place who just wants to make movies he and his filmbuff friends would like to see made, to the moment where it is shipped to select locations as a limited-circulation DVD, that is, if it ever gets to DVD. And if it does, it certainly won't be in a 2-disk special collector's edition, or even a one-disk chock-full of extra features and a specially-designed jacket cover to boot.

The IFC Center, of course, is not the only moviehouse or, for that matter, the most preferable moviehouse in the Village. Film Forum, established in 1970 by two young filmlovers with a $2,000 investment, a projector, and some folding chairs, has become over these past three decades a true cultural mainstay for New York City. As a nonprofit theatre, relying on charity and ticket sales for its operating income, Film Forum sees a good deal of its financial support from its loyal patrons, local or otherwise, who can make donations ranging from $25 to $5,000, or purchase or renew a Film Forum membership from $75 to $2,500. How Film Forum was able to stay alive on its patronage, and the generosity of public and private funders, for what will soon be 40 years shows how appreciated it is as a New York cultural institution. Filmmakers regularly make appearances here, and contemporary independent features, as well as new prints of cinema classics, are screened daily.

In my first visit to Film Forum, I saw Charlie Chaplin's 1931 masterpiece, City Lights. I followed City Lights that evening with walking 4 or so blocks to the IFC Center to catch a midnight showing of a classic midnight movie, Alejandro Jodorowsky's 1973 visual and philosophical epic, The Holy Mountain. This past Saturday, I switched theatres again--Jean-Luc Godard's 1964 crime parody, Band of Outsiders (Bande A Part) in Film Forum, as a part of their Godard 60's film program; Harmony Korine's directorial return in Mister Lonely in the IFC Center. What a pair these films turned out to be...

I Missed No Fun For This?!

As a New Jersey native, there is nothing like being back home in New York City.

OK, in all honesty, I do love, and always will, New Jersey. Just as much as I love New York City.

Returning from the south to the great upnorth, for me, was especially ideal sometime before May 16th, 17th or 18th (preferably the 16th), a week after the final day of my last semester as a Tulane undergraduate.

Those three days, those three days I will never get back, were the dates set for the fifth annual No Fun Fest, a carnival of sounds created and organized by Brooklyn-based noise artist Carlos Giffoni (and by "carnival of sounds, " I don't mean an event of musical merrymaking--of people hopping and skipping to pleasing, agreeable arrangements of voice, guitar, bass, drums, etc. By "carnival of sounds," I'm referring to the 60's cult horror classic, "The Carnival of Souls." From guitars to synthesizers, from saxophones to laptops, from ukeleles to aluminum paint trays filled with small metal objects, the "music" at No Fun Fest, with its disarrangements, if not mutilations, of very much anything that emits a sound will unnerve you, assault you, disorient you, and haunt you, even well after you've experienced it.).

Before it relocated this year to the Knitting Factory in New York City, No Fun Fest unleashed its yearly maelstrom of discord in Brooklyn, with its 2004 inaugural performances housed in club North Six, and its following performances the next 3 years in The Hook. No Fun Fest has become from the very start one of the more successful independent music festivals, attracting big names year after year from the international noise scene: Wolf Eyes and Hair Police from Michigan; John Wiese and his cut-and-paste noisecore project Sissy Spacek from Los Angeles; Philip Best of Consumer Electronics, and of legendary noise and industrial pioneers Whitehouse, from the United Kingdom; Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo, and Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth from New York City; and Yoshimi, of the pioneering noise rockers Boredoms, Incapacitants and Merzbow from Japan. No Fun Fest's success is all the more obvious since its "music"--and this should go without saying--is not really music at all. What you hear at No Fun is strictly anti-music. A discernible melody may escape here and there, but it is the proverbial needle in this haystack made of barbwire set on fire.

All musical conventions are scrapped for aural speed, ruthless volume, and torrential ambience, whether it be the brooding atmospherics of Burning Star Core, or the relentless crackle, swish, pop and boom of the Incapacitants' electric firestorm. With musical conventions, all things audible are a step or two closer from being a crude block of sound to a handsome bust of song. Without them, the block remains, free to be chiseled, sculpted, and hacked at in any way, and with any tool, to produce anything, or nothing, as a free exploration, or exploitation, of the possibilities, and impossibilities, of sound to effect, if not represent as well, the multiplicity and complexity of human emotion and thought.

This is the main reason why I'm a fan of noise, and why I really wanted to attend this year's No Fun Fest. After learning about the festival only last year, and missing the first 2 and a half of the fest's three nights, I made it a goal to not miss No Fun at all in 2008 (this was before the show dates were announced). I never expected that another "goal" of mine--as in a goal I would accomplish not for myself, but for my family; I did not care for it much myself-- would get in the way--walking on stage to be handed my degree in Tulane University's inaugural Undergraduate Diploma Ceremony, a new addition to the university's 10th anniversary Unified Commencement Ceremony, in which graduates from all of the university's schools and colleges are all gathered and recognized, this year in a place where Tulane has not had their commencements since Hurricane Katrina, the Louisiana Superdome. May 16th to the 18th were the dates set for No Fun. For the graduation ceremony, the 17th. Was there no fun to be had at all, in those three days I waited a year for? Oh man...

Alright, 3 months...

...is a long enough time. Time to resurrect this dead puppy. And who doesn't like puppies, especially dead puppies come back to life, zombie puppies? Puppies that not only do that cute, puppy-patented tilt of the head, as if to say "My word! What in blazes is that?", that we, puppy-lovers, go bat-guano gaga over like dribbling idiots. But puppies that spin their tiny, decomposed heads 360 degrees until they snap off, tumble onto the floor, and meet your feet with their rotten yet surprisingly still sharp fangs before you even have a chance to run away and thus save your humanity.

But because you were bitten by the self-beheaded zombie puppy, you then become a zombie yourself, slowly but surely. That's just the rules, however illogical or unfair it may seem to you. So when you finally become a zombie, then, naturally, you no longer fear the ravenous puppy-head, but rather you identify with it, and thus recognize it as a part of your own undead world. You now do what you can to help out your fellow creature, for the both of you are now zombie comrades, and the both of you know this, though, naturally, neither of you cannot express this except through grunting exchanges. But the grunts involved are not the grunts we the non-undead are most familiar with, which sound caustic and thus may communicate aggression, irritability, or ill-will, as in "Eeerrrrggghhh!!!" Instead, the zombie-to-zombie grunts are, relatively, gentle, and therefore zombie codes for mutual understanding, as in "Eerrgghh" or "Urrgh" or the more simple but effectively empathetic sounding "Uuhh."

In your now brittle hands, you take the zombie puppy head, which is no longer snapping its fangs at you but is instead doing that puppy-patented headtilt I was telling you about earlier, as if to say, "My, you're so kind to me," which, in zombie-speak, should translate into "Urgh, ugh errgggh err ugh eghh." You then try to attach it back to its body, which before was limping about, knocking itself into walls and furniture, leaving corpse dust everywhere, which you normally would have been angry about, given how messy and extremely unsanitary this is, especially to a room where you work to entertain family and guests, but because now you are a zombie, not only do you not care anymore, but you haven't the slightest inkling of anything that doesn't involve either your fellow undead or live human flesh to sustain yourself with. You're no longer of the material world, far away are you from the overwhelming marathon of material possessions and desires that have once crowded you, and buried your humanity under its endless feet like so many marching boots. You are now strictly within, and thus wholly unifed with, zombie nature...