Thirsty Thursday

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.

Well, they won’t dance for you, and they won’t
do what you tell them to, but Private Dancer,
the Minneapolis band Frankenstein’d out of a variety
of other stellar local acts (STNNG, Hockey
Night, Total Fucking Blood) will shit straight
rock and roll all over you and have you twitching
pleasantly in the butt mud.

Back in ’06, Nate Nelson of STNNG was jonesing
to tour some more and had always wanted
to play in a band with Ben Ivascu, a longtime
friend who serves his days in oodles of other
Minneapolis groups. So when Ben tried to coerce
Nate into sledding late one winter night, Nate’s
sneaky ass dived into action.

“It was maybe ten or eleven at night and I was
like ‘I can’t go sledding,’” said Nelson, who quickly
spun things in his favor. “Then I was like ‘if I go
sledding with you, we’re starting this band’.”
So with that VERY Minnesotan beginning,
a raucaus garage-y (and occasionally sensitive
and soft), 70’s classic rock (in the best possible
sense), guitar soaked group kicked off, as did the
search for a name.

“That’s like the hardest part about being in a
band; it’s the part I dread the most about starting
a new band - coming up with a band name,”
said Nelson. “Whatever name you start with,
it’s going to sound stupid to you in a few years
anyways.”

“I don’t think I personally had ever heard that
song before we decided on the name,” said Nelson.
“There was a boat by our drummers house
called ‘Private Dancer,’ and he wanted to name
ourselves after that boat, so we named ourselves
after that boat, which I’m sure was named after
that song.”

The group is hard at work on their second LP
with Chris Rose (of Vampire Hands and Invisible
Boy) jumping in on guitar and touring with
them after their old guitarist opted to go back
to school. They’re busting their humps trying to
make their goal of hitting each coast twice a year
to build up word of mouth on their balls-to-thewall
shows. But even with the need to tour and
spread the gospel, Nelson’s heart will always be
reserved for the twin cities.

“More than anything, what I love about Minneapolis
is that there are so many musicians and
everyone’s really good…the Blind Shake, Daughters
of the Sun, Skipper, France Has the Bomb,
there’s so many good bands and always something
going on. When you tour you realize how
good of bands we have here.”

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

One of the more touching graphic novels you can get
your hands on this year is Quebec native Pascal Girard’s
Nicolas. The short and simply-illustrated work offers a
glimpse into Girard’s past and how he dealt (or didn’t deal)
with the abrupt death of his little brother Nicolas when
they were both children. The book feels almost like a slide
show with each click showing us how pain can turn to anger
and how that anger eventually turns back into pain…but
somewhat lightened by cute pictures and goofy moments.

In contrast to its ultimate weighty content, the book
opens on the boxy Pascal and the monkeyish Nicolas, two
elementary school kids, getting ready to rock out to the
Ghostbusters theme song. Two pages later, we see a lonely
Pascal with the look of someone who’s a little broken.
Nicolas has died from a yet-undisclosed cause and nobody
is sure how to act, least of all Pascal.

“I did Nicolas on the weekend, Saturday and Sunday,”
said Girard about how the book came about. “Friday, all
day long I thought about my brother… I just said, ‘I’m missing
my brother. I will do a book about my brother.’ Then
it all came naturally.”

Conceived, written, and drawn in a single weekend, this
little vignette packs a serious, sad and ultimately uplifting
punch as we watch the confused Girard wander through
adolescence and his teen years without fully dealing with
the death. He gets stoned, does some blow, lashes out,
tip-toes around the facts, finds that a sad story makes you
more endearing to women and eventually comes to terms
with losing his little brother in a mere 69 pages.

“When I was younger I studied to become a film maker,”
said Girard. “But I didn’t really love teamwork when I
was doing the first movie.” Fortunately, after that experience
Girard discovered an artist whose work made him
think that comics could be a possible outlet for what was
brewing inside of him. “I read Jeffrey Brown (author of Unlikely
and Clumsy, two brutally honest, illustrated autobiographies
about Brown in his late teens and twenties) and it
looked easy and fun to do, because he worked in a sketch
book,” said Girard. “Just doing small and simple stories,
that’s how I began to do comics. There’s a ‘do-it-yourself’
attitude to the way of working. I love it.”

Girard’s minimalist art with its raw, sketched feel and
lack of backgrounds is one of the key pieces that makes
what you see resonate. The stripped-down drawing wasn’t
an attempt at making a statement, but an effort to streamline
the creation he had initially intended only for himself.

“At first it was a sketch book for me and I didn’t really
want to impress myself, so I thought it would be faster
and easier for me to just sketch out what was necessary
for the story as opposed to making it beautiful. So when
a publisher said they wanted to publish it, I said it was no
good, it’s ugly. I made it just for me. Some people may like
it. Some people may think it’s too easy, it’s too childlike.
But now, I think what I like about the drawing style is that
it’s honest. I’m not trying to impress the readers.”

“When you do another book though, it’s hard to draw
that way again because you said to yourself that you’re
doing a real book. I have to be more conscious about the
drawing. When I did this book it was for myself, so I didn’t
care about doing big landscapes.”

After loads of praise for the French version of Nicolas
(with people like the legendary artist Lewis Trondheim
championing it), the deeply personal and occasionally goofy
piece of work became Girard’s first work translated into
English. Now, in addition to being a little more at peace
after exploring his grief in this pocket-sized piece, he’s escaped
the mundane life of the day job that was haunting
him in his early twenties. “I’m working on three or four
books at the same time, because now I love to do work
with other artists,” said Girard. “I’m working on another
autobiography that’s funnier and lighter, I think. I did some
funny stuff in Nicolas too, but I wanted to push more of the
bad things.

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

Frankly, Patton Oswalt is kind
of the shit these days. In ’09 alone he’s
popped up in Observe and Report, The United States of Tara,
Reno 911!, Dollhouse, and Flight of the Concords. This fall he has a part in the
next Steven Soderbergh film, The Informant, and you could make yourself
a small pillow out of the stand-up discs he’s released (it wouldn’t be comfortable,
but it’s true, you could do it).

His career, as far as TV and movies, has always been pretty darn impressive,
but the buzz factor seems to have been kicked up a notch these
days. Our goofy little champion, Mr. Oswalt, is now a leading-man.
Written and directed by Robert Siegel (the writer of Mickey Rourke’s
career booster The Wrestler), the dark comedy Big Fan follows Oswalt’s
character Paul Aufiero as he goes from dedicated Giants fanatic, who has
a chance to meet one of his idols in a nightclub, to a jilted, ass-kicked,
confused adult dealing with notoriety and perspective shifts.

“[Siegel] had written that screenplay a while ago and had trouble getting
it made. Then The Wrester came out and it gave him a lot of heat
to shop it around again,” said Oswalt about how he came into the film.
“He wanted very specific people to be in it, one of them was me, I guess,
and it came down to him just saying ‘you know, I’m going to get my own
financing rather than wait for a studio to give me what I need.’ I like that
whole ‘I want this thing made, so I’m going to do it myself’ mentality.”
The ‘whatever, let’s just make the fucker’ attitude led to a quick shoot
on a tiny budget. Sans dressing rooms and catering, Oswalt knocks it out
of the park, delivering a range you wouldn’t suspect from a man who
spent years of playing the underdog.

“[Siegel] gave me the script and I read it and liked it, and the fact that
he wanted me to be the lead, and the fact that it was the kind of movie it
is, it was hard for me to say no.”

Oswalt’s involvement in Big Fan is a darker twist on people he plays or
mocks in his stand-up, but, believe it or not, it wasn’t an attempt to get
away from the King of Queens crowd.

“I’m just interested in doing anything that I like, anything that piques my
interest, so if it happens to be comedy or drama, or anything, then that’s
what I’ll do. It’s not that I’m specifically trying to compartmentalize any
part of my life and say ‘well, I’ve done that, and now I want to get away
from it.’ It’s whatever I think is good,” said Oswalt. “I don’t put things in
categories, like comedy or drama. As long as it’s good, I want to do it.”
So, I think the big question on everybody’s mind is: Do Aufiero types
come up to Oswalt when he’s in public? Does he have his own “big
fans?”

“For the most part, people are really great. They’re really nice and
they’re polite, but there’s always one percent of bad in every group, you
know, those people become the exception that prove the rule that most
of my fans are really, really cool,” said Oswalt. “The people that are weird
to me, they’re probably weird in every aspect of their life, their labor
relations, their family relations, everything. I don’t think it has anything
specifically to do with me as a person that makes them weird, I think
they’re just fucking weird all the time.”

“It’s the same fuel, but it’s a different spark,” said Oswalt of the similarities
between the obsessive Star Trek fans and the over the top sports
nuts that populate the world. “There’s no difference between somebody
who’s a born again Christian, or a comic book nerd or a sports fan,
you’re trying to take up more space in the world by attaching yourself to
something larger than you.”

With Big Fan due to hit the art house circuit this summer, Oswalt
awaits the word as to whether or not Diablo Cody’s multiple-personalities
dramady The United States Of Tara wants him back in the second season.
Whether he comes back as the acerbic Neil sidekick, or just wings it
and sees what comes his way, there’s no doubt that Oswalt will continue
to surprise the world and continue to trigger people to say, “Hey, isn’t
that that guy? From that show?”

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

Dour, dry and enigmatic - five years ago
those would have been your go-to adjectives
for explaining Bill Callahan’s alter-ego
Smog. He’s a small man with an old voice,
and his latest album, the piece of work that
has just wiped him out, is Sometimes I Wish
We Were An Eagle. It’s the second he’s
released under his own name and it’s another
gorgeous adventure into his playful
mind. It seems softer, wistful and friendly
almost, miles away from the Smog records
of yore.

Without that familiar brand name, the
years since Callahan laid Smog to rest have
been like starting over. With eleven records
released over fifteen years, Callahan
had developed a loyal fan base for Smog
amongst the same kinds of folks who adore
Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy and Jim O’Rourke.
Then with one swipe, he started releasing
albums just as himself. Sometimes I Wish
We Were An Eagle is Callahan building up
his name again, releasing something he
thinks is beautiful.

But he’s still facing the dead period
that awaits him every time he completes
a record, sometimes writing nothing that
strikes a chord in him for an entire year.
Luckily, as long as it lasts, so far it’s always
ended.

“All of a sudden it hits me and I’ll write
a record in like two or three months,” said
Callahan. “I’m always writing. I write all
the time. I don’t really give myself time off.
The more times I do it, though things definitely
change since I’ve been doing it over
18 years, you start to see patterns. They
may shift over time, but you still may start
to wonder, should I go have fun and not
even try for six months?” said Callahan. “I
never knew if I should be just doing that,
but I kind of realized over the past few records
that that period where you’re trying
to do stuff is sort of a germination process.
Something in the subconscious is happening,
because you are eventually getting to
the place where you can write stuff. So I
think it’s all part of the process of making a
new record.”

He’s not the type to conjure up a hundred
songs, record them, and widdle them
down to an album (not to mention any
names… Ryan Adams). He’s more methodical.

“I have a really clear idea of the
beginning, middle and end and I know if I’m
writing correctly they’re just all pieces of a
certain-sized puzzle.”

“I think with this record, I really clicked
with Brian [Beattie] who was the arranger.
I had done a few little things with him before,
asking him to do the record, so that
means that he had a really great understanding
of what a song was supposed to
be. He’s a really incredible guy. He loves
what he does and he pours his heart into it
plus he’s really good,” said Callahan. “Getting
to work with someone like that is the
most exciting thing. It’s kind of like having
another one of me that has different capabilities
I don’t have. I can’t write string
parts or anything like that. That kind of
made it a doubly good record.”

There’s an element of luck and skill in
finding the proper folks to get the record
done right, and it doesn’t always pan out
the way you’d expect. With the final Smog
release, A River Ain’t Too Much To Love, Callahan
found out the hard way you can’t
just wing it and hope for the best. “I sort
of made the mistake of not knowing who
the engineer was. I think it’s pretty important
to know the engineer beforehand. So
with that record, I was doing it at Willie
Nelson’s studio and I just assumed that ‘oh
the engineer is going to be awesome’ and
I’m afraid that wasn’t the case,” said Callahan.
“He didn’t really understand what
was going on, and we had a lot of technical
problems and communication problems…
I don’t like everything to be known when
I go in to make a record, it seems like it
might be too comfortable. It’s good to
take chances. I guess that was my thinking,
choosing that for that record, but I guess I
sort of learned my lesson.”

“There’s a lot of pressure while you’re
in the studio, because you’re paying money
for every hour and you have a limited time,
that’s usually a pretty high pressure situation,
in a good way, it makes you think at
the top of your game. I mean it would be
nice to not have that pressure, like if you
owned your own studio or something like
that, but it has it a function,” said Callahan.

“Just having any deadline makes you finish
something. I mean I’d like to try it someday,
having all the time in the world, but it
usually works out as good as it’s going to
work out no matter what.”

“Sometimes when you make a record
in a hurry you have to make a decisions
about the mixes and stuff you aren’t sure
about. Or you just miss things because it’s
a lot of work to cram into a little period.
So with this record we had a lot more time
to think about things. More discussion and
we also remixed a few songs where maybe
in the past I wouldn’t have had that chance.
A lot of the time when a record’s over, and
that might be a fault of mine, but when a
record’s over, it’s over. I might hear some
flaws, but don’t really… I mean, in a way
it’s good to not be able to correct things
because whatever you do, it’s a document
of what happened in that seven to eight
days. But that kind of process sometimes
leaves you with a little regret, so this time
with Brian he sort of confirmed with me
that some songs would be better if we put
things on hold and remixed things instead
of rushing forward. In that way, there’s less
flaws on this record than normally.”
With all of those beautiful, wounded,
alienated songs floating in a trail behind
him, Callahan has been pondering moving
in new directions. Like any musician, he’s
an avid listener, and soaking up all those
different flavors and styles has him thinking
about jumping into different musical
worlds and trying out new things.

“I always think about all the different
records I could make,” said Callahan about
his fantasy to record an album in every
genre before he dies. “One of them I’ve
been thinking about for a long time is sort
of in the hip-hop vein. That’s one I have
to think a lot about. It wouldn’t be traditional,
I wouldn’t sing about my Rolex or
Hennessey or anything.”

“My plan for that record is to try a little
bit of it first,” said Callahan with a chuckle.
“Just a song or two, and see if I’m crazy.”
The true test of a man and whether he
loves his craft are his yearnings for the
future. Callahan isn’t necessarily afraid of
death, he just wants to keep making his
time capsule he’ll leave behind when it’s all
over. To tap into everything he can and
see how it fits that puzzle in his brain for
the big picture.

“The sketches I have for records, I’ll
probably get to them all eventually. Even
though some of them I’ve been holding
onto for a really long time. I don’t know
if they’ll ever get made, but there’s always
more. Like the thing I’m working on now
is a brand new idea. It’s usually just something,
it’s like a litter of puppies and one
of them stands out to you, one of them
just stands out to you as the strongest one.
If it’s the right time for something, it becomes
kind of more concrete, it becomes
something more than an idea. It’s just a
feeling.”

And after all these years of rotating life
on the road with life in the studio, it’s all
still fun and fresh for Callahan. “I really
enjoy it now. I think I pretty much always
have, but I think I’ve learned to enjoy it a
little bit more. I think you learn to make
it more enjoyable over the years. I really
like traveling. I don’t like the routine of being
at home. There’s a certain routine…
which is good, kind of relaxing in a way.
Your responsibilities, having to perform
every night, the travel, all that, those are
all pretty big things you have to do, but
I always try to get a line-up that’s gonna
excite me right off the bat,” said Callahan.
“If I hated my band it would be something
I dreaded, but it’s always something I’m curious
about, to see if I can make it work.
Touring is actually thriving in the death
throes of the recording product. People
are actually buying merchandise. The record
stores are shutting down, so you kind
of gotta be like a gypsy and bring your market
to the people.”

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

Abraham Levitan, leader of Chicago glam-pop outfit Baby Teeth,
went all out last year when he decided to write a song a week for
an entire year, documenting it all through his songwriting blog “52
Teeth.”

“I read an article in the New York Times Magazine about this
guy, Jonathan Coulton, who did that project a couple years ago and
it really turbocharged his operation,” said Levitan over the phone
from his home in Chi-town. “I could sit and write for hours and
come up with five or ten songs, but I really feel like I have a blind
spot for figuring out which ones are worth a damn. The song you
spend twelve hours on [you think] is always better than the one
you spend five minutes on, but you’re almost always wrong about
that. So, by putting things on a blog and getting so much feedback
from people, it really felt like I was able to flesh out that blind spot
a little bit.”

“Most of the ones I thought were clunkers, I announced them
to be clunkers when I posted them,” said Levitan. “I think in most
cases, if you’re spending a few days on a song, and then you record
it and then have a few days pass before you play it back, I think
your opinion after that is gonna end up being the one that you stick
with.”

After spending all those months bouncing ideas around, going
back and forth with fans about the tracks, and churning out those
songs week after week, Levitan and company hit the stage to see
what connected and would end up on their third album, Hustle
Beach.

“I know there are a lot of bands that have a theory that you
should not play new songs before they are in their final, recorded
version - and I can see the merits of that - but we’re big fans of
test driving,” said Levitan. “All the songs on the record, we played
live, at least once before recording them, as well as a few other
ones that I thought were gonna be hits, but then we played them
live and it kind of felt like you were being exposed to be wearing
nothing but a pair of white briefs in front an audience. We realized
that those songs were probably not going to make the final cut.”
Looking back on the 52-song experiment? “By the end of it I
felt really burnt out,” said Levitan. “The thing that I miss the most
about it was not necessarily that I was writing more, but that I was
doing more home recording. I don’t think it’s particularly fun to
sit in front of a computer for twelve hours and burnish something
until it shines, but doing that once a week, I think I started being
able to articulate what I wanted out of an arrangement, with more
precision than I was able to before… I think that if I did that for
another year, it would be helpful.”

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

David Wain, alumni of the comedy troupes “Stella” and “The State,” has tinkered for years directing and writing smaller independent films like “Wet Hot American Summer” and “The Ten”, but hit the ground running via his first studio film “Role Models” last November.

“Role Models” is a raunchy, clever spin on the Big Brother/Big Sisters programs driven by Judd Apatow favorite Paul Rudd. Rudd plays a cynical, angry man-boy alongside Sean William Scott. When Rudd has an energy drink driven meltdown involving vehicular violence, the duo avoid jail time by agreeing to do community service for Sturdy Wings, serving as mentors to lonely children in need of, you guessed it, role models.

“It was a project that had been in development for a while. It was with a different studio, a different director It was just sort of one of these things that had been around,” said Wain. “Paul Rudd did a draft of it and as it went through that phase is when I started to get involved. At that time, me, Paul and Ken Marino really sat down and created [the] version of the film that we ended up shooting.”

Jumping aboard a film that had so much history in turn-around and had so many different writers tweaking and adjusting the script, left Wain and company with the task of giving it more of a singular voice.

“There were so many writers and all of them put something in there. We basically took broad strokes, the broadest of broad strokes of the story, but otherwise we wrote it from the beginning,” said Wain. “We created many new characters. We created new through lines. We changed the characters that were there. We created all new scenes and set pieces. We kind of just used the skeleton.”

Though everyone will immediately notice McLovin’ (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) and the delectable Elizabeth Banks have meaty roles, the attentive and knowledgeable viewer (i.e. fellow dorks) will take note that throughout it’s runtime, the film contains almost everyone who was involved in “The State” and a handful of other sharp comics including Matt Walsh from the Upright Citizens Brigade and Ken Jeong, more widely known as Dr. Ken in “Knocked Up.”

“One of the things I tried to bring to it was a little flavor of my sort of voice and to me part of that is collaborating with the rep. company of performers that I’ve worked with in various configurations over the last twenty years,” Wain said of the ringers he employed. “I very deliberately brought in as many of those people as I could, because they’re the funniest people I know. I knew they would bring much more to every role than just what is on the page. You bring in, for example Joe Lo Truglio, or any of them, you know that they’ll just raise it up three notches from what’s on the page.”

Wain also ended up casting the show stealer: little Bobb’e Johnson. Johnson, who plays a mouthy, wild young boy that Scott tries to mentor, dominates every scene he’s in with his quips about Ben Affleck, his penchant for torturing Christopher Mintz-Plasse’s D&D geek character, and the slow revelation of his vulnerability.

“He’s a force of nature. He’s amazing,” Wain said of Johnson. “He was pretty well known before that, he did a lot of TV stuff and movies and stand-up and he came in and gave the most insane audition. It was kind of a given as soon as everyone saw him that there was nobody else who could do play the role.”

Having worked on indie films before, Wain faced every writer/directors fear: the studio system and invasive producers.

“Surprisingly, for the most part they were incredibly helpful actually. Their ideas, both the studio’s and the producers’, the ideas they had and suggestions they had pushed us to do better in almost every case,” said Wain. “There’s definitely the sort of bureaucracy of the studio that’s always kind of frustrating where you have to go through a lot layers before you can get answers or approval on certain things. Overall, a lot of what I feared in doing a studio project, in this particular case, didn’t come to pass. The people who were overseeing the project were pretty smart.”

Along with directing, co-writing and cameo-ing in “Role Models”, Wain also had to fit voice work into the mix for the new Adult Swim show “Superjail!”

“The guy who does the animation for ‘Superjail!’ is named Aaron Augenblick, and he did an animated piece for my feature film ‘The Ten’. So that’s how I met him and then he brought me in to do this,” said Wain. “That was an interesting experience, because I was in LA and making the film while they were doing ‘Superjail!’ out of Brooklyn. So I basically had to go into a little room and do my voice like at 6 a.m. before going to shoot on certain days.”

“They kind of created this character and asked me to play it and then they ended up tweaking the character to be a little bit more like me. It was a very interesting process how they did that,” said Wain. “It was sort of surreal to see the finished project on TV having had no interaction, even with the people who made it, but I think it’s awesome. It’s a really weird and crazy show.”

Wain has also been utilizing the ‘Net for it’s instant gratification ability with the speedy output of the third season of his comedy shorts “Wainy Days”.

“There’s 26 of them now on MyDamnChannel.com… The next batch, I don’t know yet when or what form it will be, but I was very surprised and pleased at how much attention and accolades it got. I didn’t even know what a web series really was before I started doing it. ‘Role Models’ was a very long process, everything took kind of forever. It was very slow. With ‘Wainy Days,’ you come up with it, you shoot it, you edit it, it’s up online and people see it within a week, which is great.”

“We did these ‘Stella’ short films as early as ‘98, and were putting them up on the web pre-YouTube, pre-all of this stuff, and it was the same kind of thing where we would run around with the camera doing something funny and it got out there. It was really cool. It’s definitely, as far as filmmaking goes, the most immediate format you can do. With election season, there’s parodies of events from the day before up online… it can’t be beat.”

After the hectic year he’s had (which included the birth of his first child), Wain’s currently keeping busy with another online only gem. Last December marked the start of “Children’s Hospital”, a “Grey’s Anatomy” type spoof starring former “Daily Show” correspondent Rob Corddry over on TheWB.com. Though he’s much in a need of a vacation, it looks like Wain isn’t taking a break anytime soon.

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

Even though you’ve never heard of her, Esther Watson is way cooler than you.
She just went across the country trying to find out what people define ‘beauty’ as. When she was a kid, her dad used to build flying saucers in the backyard. McSweeney’s thinks her paintings are so neat that they’re releasing a book of them in April, and now her mini-comic “Unlovable”, with which she has been documenting some of the sharpest, most painful everyday moments of teendom, is being collected this January in the first of two gigantic volumes that follow the depressingly realistic adventures of one Ms. Tammy Pierce.

What makes “Unlovable” way more interesting that your typical high school angst-ography is that it’s true. Watson was travelling up the west coast in the early 90’s when she discovered an abandoned journal in a truck stop restroom. Penned by a pained teenage girl suffering through new wave and pastels, the raw and horrifying high-school flashbacks sparked something inside Watson when she opened the diary.

“I’ve always kept journals, since I was 13… and I really identify with someone who is just not perfect, but is trying really hard to do the best she can, and to fit in,” Watson said of the inspiration of her Tammy character. “It was really nice to read a diary where someone felt the same at that time and just put so much importance [into] and tried so hard to be accepted. And like Tammy tries so hard to be accepted by friends.”

Watson has been trying to figure out how to tell this particular story since the ‘90’s. “Unlovable” has shifted from an artist’s scrapbook, to a novel, and at one point it lived as a short story that landed an excerpt in YM magazine, but never managed to get any attention from publishers. It wasn’t until Watson stopped trying to get ‘Unlovable’ published that she wound up doing things her own way and marketed the resulting mini-comic herself, that her Tammy character was finally formed.

“I would just kind of sell [‘Unlovable’] locally. I’d carry around with a shoebox full of them and just sell them around Los Angeles… and then I got this call, like in ‘05, from Anne Elizabeth Moore that said her and Harvey Pekar [of “American Splendor” fame] got a hold of one of my ‘Unlovable’s’ and they wanted to put one of the stories in ‘Best American Comics [2006]’.”
At that point, interest began to really brew around her work and she realized that she was hitting a nerve.

“I really love awkward moments. Life is always really good and really bad mixed together. When that happens at the same time and it’s really awkward and overwhelming and you’re think ‘how did I get myself into this situation and how do I get myself the hell out of this situation’, that’s like the perfect moment…I really love to be able to capture that awkward, really uncomfortable feeling, and just linger in it,” said Watson. “I do that a lot with Tammy where in the diary she’ll have said something in a brief sentence, but in my comic I will elongate that moment for as many pages as possible and I’ll just keep Tammy in this really awkward place for as long as possible. And I really feel that’s where people connect, that’s where people relate. Kind of ‘I’ve been there’.”

With the entire “Unlovable” story finally collected and ready to be digested as a whole, Watson assures those who’ve jumped aboard her crazy train that Tammy’s awkward years aren’t necessarily over.

“I have tons of Tammy material. So it just kind of feels like [like volume two is] the end of the year and maybe Tammy’s kind of realized a few things,” said Watson. “It’s probably not a goodbye to Tammy.”

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