Thirsty Thursday

Sparkle Picnic: Freeze My Poops, Put ‘em in You (Episode #3, Series 4)

Mario & Chatroulette

In the 16th episode, Jason talks to his friend Mik about a bulldog that fucks a couch, horrible jobs, losing confidence doing stand-up, comedy clubs and their hatred of people taping sets, the greatness of “Rosengren Stories pt. 2?, and much much more in wtfiasp 16.

Note that this was recorded prior to the passing of Ashton Rosengren, so there is no mention of it.

OR!!!!

In the 15th episode, Jason talks with his friend John. Topics of interest are chimp attacks (those fuckers are unstoppable), vicious reality on public transportation, the wonders of drinking until you pee in sinks, a perhaps amusing tale of a pedophile in action, a really sad story about someone dropping acid and oodles upon oodles more in this, the latest episode of WTFIASP.

OR!!!!

Shot this on a mild Saturday in February. Phil almost puked from tugging Kyle through the snow, and Kyle did half of it without a coat. He makes a nice dead body.

This is off of Phil’s inBOIL album. The name of the song is “On the Run”.

I like it.

Sparkle Picnic: Sleepy Junkie Needles (Episode #2, Series 4)

For round two of ROSENGREN STORIES, we cover the following hot topics: Nigerian ravers in the Wisconsin Dells, confusing craigslist ads that may allude to animal sex (or not), mescaline suicide, Ketmine, a local homeless man who has ruined his life to be with an actress and a trio of homeless drunks who are having a blast at 11am. All that, PLUS… prostitution (shh!).

http://sparklepicnic.podbean.com/mf/web/tem3xp/Mixdown1.mp3

Rejection is at the core of the creative process.
Rejection from peers, rejection from love interests,
rejection from parents, those are all moments that
pull people inward and helps them find some sort of
an outlet. Then comes round two, being rejected all
over again, on a larger scale, as they try to find an
audience for whatever it is they’ve been making.

The documentary Official Rejection follows filmmaker
Scott Storm desperately trying to break into the
film festival circuit with his second feature film Ten ‘til
Noon. Instead of just being a little featurette on the
Ten ‘til Noon DVD about how they shopped the flick
around to various festivals and how it was sold and
whatnot, it ends up being about the trials, tribulations
and politics (a snapshot if you will) of what happens
to the other folks, the people that don’t get into Sundance,
or Cannes, or any of the major film festivals
around the world. It’s a look at playing the smaller,
unheard of festivals where the movies probably aren’t
as good, but are still given that shot at not only finding
an audience, but being able to see the film in its
proper home, the movie theater.

“Festival people are on the fence about this film,”
said Scott Storm, the focus of Official Rejection. “They
either love it or they hate it, they’re either offended
or they’re really into it.”

That’s a fair reaction, too. For every festival they go
to in the film, or try to get their film into, half of them
turn out to be quite shady. Whether it’s the outlandish
fees entrants pay in the hopes of being accepted,
the sad reality that a good deal of flicks not even being
watched past the five minute mark by the festival
screening crew (even if you did send them $120), or
the ill-equipped theaters that organizers don’t seem
to know how to work, it’s a hell of an uphill battle.

One of the film’s most devastating sequences
is thanks to Chicago’s own Indie Fest. After paying
more to enter their movie than with any other festival,
Storm and company find out that if they don’t
sell enough tickets to their screening, they’ll be pulled
from the fest. They can’t promote ticket sales because
there’s no set schedule, so they’re forced to
buy them out of their own pocket. With a dark cloud
already brewing, they travel to Chicago to find that
everyone involved comes off as incompetent and underhanded.
From the zero promotion of any of the
films by the festival coordinators (a local film critic
is interviewed and revealed no press release was put
out to inform local journalists that the event was
even happening), to the inability of the filmmakers to
contact any officials involved to find out what was
going on, to the amazing horror that was the eventual
screening of Storm’s Ten ‘til Noon (which started
hours late and after the majority of the patrons wandered
off), the whole festival was a complete debacle
that completely wasted the teams money and time.

“As far as I know the Indie Fest people haven’t seen
the movie. We haven’t played it in Chicago yet,” said
Paul Osborne, the director of Official Rejection. “I’ve
never spoken to them about it, but everyone talks
about Chicago Indie Fest in the reviews, so if that
guy’s doing any Google searches for his festival, it’s
going to come up.”

“The people who come off as the villains, so to
speak, I don’t tend to seek them out to show them
the movie,” said Osborne. “Don Frank of Tremendous
Fest doesn’t come off the best in the film. He
did ask for a DVD, but even if he wasn’t coming off
poorly, his festival doesn’t screen documentaries,
so I wouldn’t give him one anyway… why invite the
fight?”

Even Troma’s Lloyd Kaufman, known for making
low-budget B Movies like The Toxic Avenger and Sgt.
Kabukiman, N.Y.P.D., who hams it up throughout
his interviews, comes off as kind of a douche bag.
He plays up being outside of the system and just
being another struggling artist competing against
the big guys of Universal and Miramax, while his
street team papers over every single flyer they find
posted during one festival, even going as far as to
laugh at a frustrated filmmaker whose poster they
completely cover right in front of her. He ends
up just being another part of the problem, playing
dirty politics in the name of getting to the top of
the heap.

Though there are many bumps in the road and
tons of assholery throughout, Official Rejection
boils down to a stab at the biggest charlatan of all:
Sundance.

Sundance is by far the biggest festival in the United
States and is draped in the dreams of would be
filmmakers who look at their favorite writers and
directors and how Sundance made them who they
are. Unfortunately, those very same people they
look up to are completely aware that the days of
Sundance actually discovering a true independent
film are over. Even Kevin Smith, whose film Clerks
made his career back in ’94 via Sundance, acknowledges
that if Clerks were made today, in the same
manner of being paid for by himself and friends, it
wouldn’t make it in.

“If Sundance admitted that you really have no shot
submitting your film if you’re really nobody, and that
a lot of their films come in through agents, their
submissions would go down significantly and they
would lose hundreds of thousands of dollars. They
would lose sort of the street cred that they have of
being the discovery festival. They would lose a lot
of their sponsors and big ticket movies that come
in… the reason Paramount will take, or HBO will
take a lower budget studio picture that’s got kind of
an indie sensibility, call it an indie and then ‘have it
discovered at the festival’ just because that festival
has that reputation. If that reputation ceases to exist,
that’s a marketing ploy that HBO or Universal or
whoever can no longer use to sell those movies and
that means they have to think outside of the box to
sell an unusual picture… it’s a whole domino effect,
but in the end it works for everybody except for
indie filmmakers and smaller festivals that are actually
playing the independent films that Sundance used
to play and should still be playing if their reputation
were true.”

While the story does have a happy ending in that
they were able to sell the film and get some decent
distribution, the sad fact is that this mindfuck of a circus
awaits everyone making a movie without studio
backing. The weirdest part of the film is that while
we watch the film about trying to get Ten ‘til Noon
shown at fests, the exact same thing is happening
at this very moment as Osborne and Storm try to
screen Official Rejection.

“At Q&A, people say to us ‘wow, you guys went
through a lot,’” said Osborne. “We’re still going
through a lot. We’re doing the same damn thing right
now. It’s hard to watch the movie when you’re going
through the same process right now.”

When everything is said and done, this is a film
for filmmakers, and more importantly, it’s the voice
of them saying “fuck you” to Sundance and to all the
people who work so hard to bring us the same movie
over and over, while locking out the little guys.

Originally published in the Winter ‘09 issue of Ghettoblaster, a quarterly culture and entertainment mag.

The Black Heart Procession make the kind
of music you’d play if you were planning on killing
yourself in your ex-girlfriends house and you
needed a soundtrack to her discovering your
body. It’s lonely, sad, dark yet somewhow gorgeous,
but this is no soundtrack to teenage angst.
They’re not Hot Topic goth.

“Well, when we first started it was sort of a
break from what we were doing with Three Mile
Pilot,” said Tobias Nathaniel, pianist and half the
brain and heart of the Black Heart Procession.
“We didn’t even really intend for it to be a band
in the first place.”

“I’d just moved into Pall’s house and I remember
it was around the holiday time and I’d just sit
at home and write some music on piano,” said
Nathaniel. “He’d come home and say, ‘Oh, that’s
a cool idea. Let’s work on some stuff,’ and before
you now it we had ten, eleven songs.”

“After that it wasn’t long before we decided,
‘Hey, lets just go play a show’ and ‘hey, maybe
we can go record this stuff’,” said Nathaniel. “It
all happened really, really quickly. I think the first
record went from concept to finished and mastered
in about a month.”

The first album, 1, came out in ’98 and was
something wholly different from the prog rock
of Three Mile Pilot. Though Jenkins sang for both
outfits, Black Heart Procession clearly took after
the sorrow of Nick Cave, but with weirder
instruments.

“Some of our very early shows were just Pall
and I with piano and vocals and musical saw. We
used some unusual instrumentation, like waterphone.
It’s sort of like a metal jug with spires of
different sizes welded to it and you pour water
in to the jug part and bow it. You bow the spires
and swish the water around and it creates this
really eerie, nifty noise. We used a lot of unusual
stuff like that and we’d just get up there and
play.”

“[There were] some guest drums on a few
songs and we occasionally had drums live, that’s
kind of what the early days were like,” said Nathaniel.

“It evolved into a few more songs with
more drum-oriented stuff and we added a keyboard
player, but still keeping the piano and vocals
as sort of the primary instruments.”

And that’s pretty much how the process has
continued since the conception of the band, the
two of them bouncing ideas off each other and
holding down the core of the group as they bring
in ringers here and there to fill out their sound.
They’ve been together making music at a relatively
quick pace, putting out a new Black Heart
Procession album every few years, evolving from
quiet and moody, with songs that float in the air
like a dark cloud, to almost a gloomy pop band
on ‘07’s The Spell.

“I was gone from home quite a bit,” said Nathaniel
about writing and recording The Spell. “I
didn’t want that to happen again on this record,
so we just sort of took our time, took it easy.”

Six bypasses the slick, radio ready triumph of
The Spell by going back to the looser and more
atmospheric early recordings. The lack of a full
band lets you wallow in the lyrics, making for a
less anthemic record that still does a little stomping
here and there.

“It’s a bit back to some of our earlier roots,
it’s a different approach than our last couple
records where we had a lot of folks playing on
them,” said Nathaniel. “This record started out
as just Pall and I trying to come up with some
new ideas and see where we stood. It was different.
There was a bit more freedom… It allowed
us a little bit to experiment and try new things,
and also old things for Black Heart.”

Six was stitched together in two and a half
years, built out of 13 carefully constructed, labored
over, cherry picked tracks.

“This record, it took a little push and pull… so
I think once we latched on to the direction we
were going, these ones made a good sequence, a
good story for the record,” said Nathaniel. “We
did have thirty-ish ideas… we did quite a bit of
work, but we were very picky about the ones
that ended up on the record.”

As for the abandoned tracks, if they’re good
enough, they tend to find a home.

“We look at songs for the album as needing to
be of a specific quality, the ones that could eventually
be for EP’s we’re not so strict about. So if
anytime we need something for a compilation or
7-inch EP, we can just dig into the stock pile and
finish things up.”

“Two of them [songs scrapped from Six], we
resurrected and got finished for the Japanese
release,” said Nathaniel. “Where, you know, in
Japan they require two additional songs. Cause
they’re special, they always get two more songs
than everyone else.”

After more than twelve years of being in bands
together, Nathaniel and Jenkins are still finding
excitement in their profession and each other’s
company.

“Even though it takes longer now, those moments
of inspiration when you feel like something
cool is happening, they still happen, they
just happen less frequently,” said Nathaniel about
the early years versus now. “I guess it’s sort of
like a relationship. In the beginning everything is
really exciting, everything is wonderful. As time
goes on those moments are still there, they’re
just more spread out.”

Originally published in the Winter ‘09 issue of Ghettoblaster, a quarterly culture and entertainment mag.