Who do you think you are?

Once upon a time I wrote for Culturebot under the nefarious nom de spam of Ivan Bellman.  Ivan & I executed many a dance of death, emulating a Gonzo style of art and performance criticism that involved a sordid assortment of over and under the counter literary masturbation aids.  Due to the influence of marriage, age and a little help from my friends, I find myself much transformed, now attempting to use my powers for good.  Demonology, alchemy and counter-culture proclivities still abound although, contrary to what Mishima, Genet, Sade, Fassinder and Kathy Acker purport, stage blood is indeed enough.

The following is the first of several pieces about a recent journey to Cannes.  People have been asking so this is my attempt at showing and telling.  As per Letters from Somewhere and Tina Fey Camel Toe, some of the names have been changed to protect the guilty and innocent alike.

This Sunday @ NEW FEST!

X-TINA

The actual number of years that I have been working with writer, Marina Shron on the feature length screenplay X-TINA is a bit embarrassing.  In this protracted time span, the project has driven writer, director and more than one producer well past the thres- hold of sanity.  Yet, like an adroit pimp or drug dealer, it keeps us coming back for more.

Part of the problem(/appeal/addiction) is the story’s content.  The title-character (pronounced /kris-ˈtē-nə/ like X-mas) is a teenage prostitute who gets taken in by an infertile Upper East Side couple before fucking and killing them both.  The feature is also book-ended [or bracketed] by scenes of Christina’s budding relationship with her next male sponsor, Nikki, who she is attracted to because of Nikki’s man-boobs which are about b-cup.  We’re hoping to get funding from the Oxygen Network or maybe Disney.

(This last part is not true.  Uncle Walt would have us arrested as pedophiles to distract from him being a fascist.  If Ivan Bellman and myself were conjoined twins we would be joined at the spleen. The point being that this is not a commercial venture in the mass- media sense.  But, to quote John Waters via one of his celluloid avatars, “family is just a dirty word for censorship.”)

Our solution to the art vs. marketing quandary was to cull a short film out of the script.  The result was “Christina and Nikki meet in a bar and share a beer along with small tall of sex and murder.  Two disjoined lives come together for a fleeting moment to form an unfamiliar constellation.”  You don’t like it, write your own damn log line.   I’m cool if you don’t like my ideas as long as you have a better one of your own.  Go ahead.  Really!  Fire away!!!  Hey, have you ever thought of being a film producer?

Anyway, the short film version of X-TINA was shot on HD by Chris Cannucari (rhymes with Ferrrari) and stars Jim Findlay and Shauna Kelly.  I did a rough cut of the film and then got some help from a residency with Outpost back when David “Dicko” Dixon was running the show over there.  The sound sucked.  Now I know why the sound guy (never met a female sound guy) is the only one who gets paid on low-fi shoots.  Jim Dawson remixed the sound for the short and he is an audio deity to which I pay homage (in addition to a paltry sum of increasingly unstable American dollars.)

The last toot of my own directorial horn is that some of the flick is shot on Pixel Vision camera.  This is a toy camera made in the 70’s by Fischer Price.  It records on to cassette tapes (this are like vinyl records only different for you Gen Z 80’s babies.)  The result is a ghostly square image like a black and white Polaroid that would hard to replicate even with slick post-production filters.

Yup.  I’m a dork.

After being summarily rejected by several festivals (thatwedidn’tlikeanywaysothere), we were accepted into the Short Film Corner at Cannes Film Festival. As my friend Lucius (pronounced LOO-shih-uhs), a film festival impresario, explained to me via email, “the Shorts Corner is an initiative of the Film Market – to bring young talent/new recruits to freshen up the air.”  Its fun to hear a veteran of his experience wax of the when there was just one venue and if you wanted to meet someone you just sat at the café pretending to sketch deep thoughts into your grrrunal behind your Ray-Bans and the person you sought, no matter how famous, would just show up eventually.

Now, 64 years later, the bougey boutique beach town gives way each May to the many-headed hydra of grotesque, surreal proportions that is the Film Festival.  Like a goat with six stomachs it ingests the famous, the parasites, the talent-free, the good, the bad and the ugly with no discrepancy.  The Official Selection or Grand Prix comprised of twenty or so films competing for the coveted Palme D’Or to Parallel Selections, awards given outside the Festival, there are international pavilions as well as the Marché du Film, the hyper film market in the world.  There are now seven main venues which sell-out regularly and hundreds of smaller theaters where shorts, docs, features and everything shy of (but not completely excluding) straight-up porn.

In the basement, in a corner one could find the Short Film Corner wherein the same hubbub carried on that you might find at the New York Fringe Festival.  Anti-climatic?  Oh yeah.  Worthwhile?  Ehhh… why not?

Over the course of the following installments I will be chronicling my journey to the south of France (this all having happened already which makes me a bad blogger) not that there is a such a thing as its converse);-).  American interns, illusive yacht parties, the elusive burlesque performer Julie Atlas Muz along with even a film or two are all in the cut.  Whether you want to whet your film fest desire, are dying to get beyond the velvet ropes or are just plain curious then stay tuned!

In the meantime you can come see X-tina at the New York’s GLBT NEW FEST on Sunday June 6th, 2010:

http://filmguide.newfest.org/tixSYS/2010/xslguide/eventnote?EventNumber=2012&

(I knew that the transhetronormative angle would pay off some day!  King a’ the world, Ma!  King of the world!!!)

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Last Address is an elegiac film made up of exterior images of the last residential addresses of a group of New York City artists who died of AIDS:

a film by Ira Sachs
produced by Lucas Joaquin
shot by Michael Simmonds
edited by Brian A. Kates
sound by Damian Volpe
additional assistance by Jonathan Boyd and Andrei Alupului

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SXSW 2010

The quintessential South by Southwest Festival (SXSW) happening came at the tail end of the festivities on Saturday, March 20th when Joseph Gordon-Levitt hosted and curated an evening of music, film and live performance at the G-Tech Theater located at the Austin Convention Center for hitRecord.org. The music, film and interactive event featured live performances by Sean Lennon and Charlotte Kemp Muhl of The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger. This event was “quintessential” as it mixed the three pillars of the festival with a super-cool indie film actor. This is what SXSW is all about. It has one foot in the past, with sights set on what is yet to come.

The music portion of SXSW boasts almost 2,000 bands, booked into more than 85 venues, with parties hosted by radio stations like WFMU, WOXY, KUT, KGSR, and even NPR; The interactive bit had panels from social justice to social networking; and the movies include everything from animated shorts, experimental shorts, documentaries, narrative features, and the world première of “Kick-Ass”. Even the first look at the new Predator flick was shown. Too much happens at SXSW for one person to catch everything, too much happens at SXSW for organization to catch everything, but I will highlight the most impressive aspects I found at the festival.

Movies

Life 2.0

There were several noteworthy films, but the one that has haunted me for days is a documentary called “Life 2.0” which follows four people and their interactions in the online game Second life. Shockingly human, this documentary about a video game drips with emotion as we see the players struggle with challenges in the virtual and real world. Refreshingly, the filmmakers make rock solid choices on how to present each player from moment to moment, from avatar to person. This is the kind of documentary film school professors’ hope their students will make.

Interactive

Although SXSW encompasses the entire city of Austin, AOL setup shop on the ground floor of the Austin Convention Center, ground zero for the festival, to plant SEED.com, a new localized, viral journalism branch of AOL rooted in the media giant’s subsidiaries. With SEED, writers and photographers can accept and be paid for various assignments. Although I’ve seen ideas like this in the past, AOL is much more organized with SEED then other ventures. With the incentive for payment, and team of editors accepting and rejecting work, could SEED be the face of new journalism?

Zone Perfect live.create.lounge

On a personal note, I really enjoyed the “Zone Perfect live.create.lounge”, which featured an open bar, free peanut butter and dark chocolate Zone Perfect bars (which taste acceptable after six gin and tonics), live music, and a wall you could collaboratively paint. People who downloaded the Zone Perfect “MyTown” application for the iPhone got a free $15 iTunes gift card.

Music

In fairness to my new friends at Zone Perfect, every “lounge” and party features a free bar. If you’re sober at SXSW you’re doing something wrong or you’re in grade school. The best parties this year included the Paste Magazine party at the Galaxy Room, and the Blurt Magazine party at the infamous Irish pub B. D. Riley’s the afternoon after St. Patrick’s Day. A band that stuck at Paste was The Givers-a group of crowd-pleasing melody makers from Louisiana. However, the best music at SXSW always comes out of the “unofficial” SXSW events. An unofficial event can be found in every corner, but four good bands including New York’s Jupiter 1 and Nashville’s Heypenny at a house party hosted by this guy and his fantastic wife. Both bands are worth your attention, and this really was the best music I heard at SXSW.

Heypenny

With roots and an emphasis on music the death of Alex Chilton hung over the festival. The Big Star front man was a legend in Austin, and was to play the festival. Chilton was in the 2.0 phase in his life and his death on Wednesday night reverberated across the festival and controlled twitter feeds. His passing even made CNN Headline News. Chilton’s death was a quintessential one for the 2010 festival with one foot in the past and its eyes on what is yet to come.

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If, like the NY Times dance critic Alastair Macaulay, you are “only slightly acquainted with the work of three of these artists (Beth Gill, Ralph Lemon, Sarah Michelson) and not at all with three others (John Jasperse, Jennifer Monson, Anna Liv Young),” or even if you are,  check out the Dance On Camera Festival kicking off today and running til February 2nd at locations throughout the city.  But mostly at Walter Reade Theatre at Lincoln Center. Lots of cool stuff and a good chance to learn about choreographers you may not have been exposed to live.

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Frank Rich has a great column in the Times about the new George Clooney movie Up In The Air:

“Up in the Air” is not a political movie. It won’t be mistaken for either a Michael Moore or Ayn Rand polemic on capitalism. What makes it tick is Ryan’s struggle to reclaim his own humanity, a story that will not be described or spoiled here. But the film’s backdrop is just as primal — and these days perhaps more universal — than the personal drama so movingly atomized by Clooney in the foreground.

I saw it over the weekend and really enjoyed it.

BTW- Culturebot’s own Timothy Braun did a Five Questions with Walter Kirn – author of Up In The Air.

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In the NY TIMES week ahead section they highlighted the upcoming showing of REPO MAN at Lincoln Center saying, REPO MAN “could serve as a manifesto for much of American independent film over the succeeding 25 years.”

I made a similar argument in an article on Nerve.com called PUNK PLANET. Read it. Some of my better writing.

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Since 1987, MIX NYC has been making history and legends by challenging mainstream notions of gender and sexuality through the preservation, promotion and production of queer experimental film and avant-garde cinema.  Characterized by vanguard screenings, exciting interactive installations and infamous parties, all of the media presented is rooted in the lives, politics, and experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and otherwise queer-identified people.

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Just saw Where the Wild Things Are which is a dark, moody, psychologically adroit and incredibly moving film. Not really for kids – though it speaks directly to your inner child in an archetypal, Jungian way. I was deeply moved and almost as deeply troubled – more like rattled. The film just had this child-logic that felt emotionally true. I’m still trying to unravel my response. I think it spoke to feelings of helplessness and powerlessness that never fully go away, the attempt to understand the ever-changing social dynamics of an alien adult world (that never really gets any easier or clearer). Really great, quite an accomplishment. Here’s the trailer:

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i’m looking forward to this. or maybe i’m not.

NOTE TO CASTING DIRECTORS: IF ADAM GOLDBERG IS UNAVAILABLE, I’M ALWAYS AVAILABLE AND LOOK REALLY SIMILAR.

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Just got back from Capitalism: A Love Story, the new Michael Moore movie. Go see it. It is not his best – in fact at times it feels a bit rote – but it is still a powerful film. The stunts feel less important than the central premise – that democracy has been hijacked by extreme capitalists who have, essentially, gutted America for their benefit. Now, I’m a dyed-in-the-wool leftist pinko socialist so it was definitely preaching to the converted. I’m predisposed to believe what Moore says. But what surprised me about the film was how inspired I was, how much I felt like I’d allowed myself to be lulled into inaction and passively accepting the status quo. Moore makes it seem plausible – even possible – that there could be a progressive resurgence, that we might be able to return to a values-set predicated on community, responsibility, compassion, justice and equality. Check out the trailer:

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