MP3: “Blue Room Light” by Tara Jane O’Neil
Local musicians, these movies could be your lives. In the mid-90s, the writing/directing team of Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley created a pair of films set in the indie music world of low-paying shows, tour woes and fickle fans, each exploring big dreams on open roads and each arriving at very different destinations.
The latter was lensed while the pair were touring Spain with the former, and Tuesday saw them both released on a two-film DVD. To mark the release, the films themselves are going on tour, and this Thursday night they’ll play as a double feature at Carabar in Columbus Ohio. The Parsons Avenue club might not be the ideal venue for taking in a film, but the clientele are likely to appreciate the films more than most—in general, the closer you are to the sorts of scenes depicted in the films, the more you’ll dig them.
First up is 1994’s Half-Cocked, a gritty, grainy, black-and-white film that has the lived-in, lo-fi aesthetic of Clerks, but is much more natural and much less affected (that is, everyone in it doesn’t talk like Kevin Smith writes).
Tara Jane O’Neil plays a young woman named Tara, at that stage of life where she’s no longer a kid living at home but not yet a grown-up either.
She lives in a big party house with a lot of roommates, the type of place people are always hanging out at, where there are parties every night and bands playing on every floor. She spends her days falling asleep in a ticket booth at a dollar theater, and, like the rest of her friends, dreaming of escaping to…something better.
Her older brother is the primping, asshole lead singer of the band The Guilloteens, and when he slaps her on stage during a show, she gets her revenge by stealing his band’s van with all of their equipment, prompting her and four of her friends to decide to split town and pretend to be a real band, staying on tour forever (Or as long as they can before they either get arrested or starve to death).
There’s a bad dream like tension to the premise, which seems just this side of unrealistic, or at least like something kids too young to know how to even drive a van might attempt.
Director Hawley has a great eye, finding the beauty of a girl’s eyes and lips peeking out behind a face-ful of bangs, the landscape racing past the side of the highway, or a crowded diner table cluttered with hours of cigarettes, paper and conversation.
She and co-writer Galinsky also have great fun addressing people’s perception of artists, and poking holes in artists’ perceptions of themselves.
Tara and her friends have absolutely no idea how to play their instruments, or even assemble their equipment (or hell, even pretend to assemble it credibly), but they talk their way into landing a spot on a show (when they don’t know the answer to a question, they just stare blankly, and the questioner assumes its just that way with musicians—sometimes they stare blankly at you).
When they get on stage and start smashing and plucking at things randomly, everyone just assumes that they’re an “experimental” band; “What kind of music do they play?” a show-goer asks a doorman, and when he hears the discordant squeals coming from over his shoulder, he replies matter-of-factly, “Art rock.”
Sometimes it goes smoothly, sometimes much less so, but as they stay on the road, they eventually coalesce into a band called Truckstop and, by the climax, have started sounding less like a noise act and more like a rougher Sonic Youth.
The proceedings have a naturalistic charm and casual sense of humor about them, and the toll of a tour, even one with actual tour dates and an end of the road, begin to take their toll—the hunger, the insomnia, the boredom, the slow realization that you actually all hate each other. Most of the characters aren’t terribly well defined, and the film sort of trails off into a sort of narrative ellipses, but it’s hard not to like.
Set to a soundtrack that includes Sleepyhead, Rodan, Unwound, Slant 6, Helium, Smog and some band called Gaunt, it’s a chunk of the mid-90s frozen and preserved in amber, and it ages well, seeming nostalgic and accessible rather than dated. I felt like I was 18 again while watching it—in a good way.
Radiation, co-written and co-directed by the pair, lacks the wild-eyed, infectious optimism and goofy appeal of Half-Cocked, but the 1998 film is a more slickly produced and polished product in almost every respect.
Our narrator and protagonist is Unai (Unai Fresnedo), a young, Spanish promoter who experienced something akin to a religious experience at his first show, and wanted to be involved in the music scene. Promoting allowed him to bring his favorite bands to Spain and hang out with him, but it didn’t make him rich, or even well off, so he started supplementing his promoting with drug dealing, selling to club-goers while the band he’s promoting plays.
Unai’s various jobs necessitate a great deal of confidence, bullshit and people skills, and while he seems to have all three in spades, he doesn’t always use the right ones at the right time, and we meet up with him just as his delicately balanced world—each layer of it built upon a deal which the other party can pull out of at any moment—starts to unravel.
He’s supposed to be taking American band Come on tour, but when a date goes bad and they bail, his tour becomes more and more quixotic, with only a single act, spoken word/performance artist Mary (Katy Petty) and his long-suffering best friend/partner Ignacio (Ignacio Fernandez), riding alongside him as he faces the existential horror of a promoter/drug dealer with no band, no drugs and no money.
Hawley and Galinsky again find beauty in unlikely places—traffic on a crowded street, a dingy bar, a dancing crowd—and after watching Unai build an elaborate house of cards, it’s interesting to watch them all fall down. Stereolab, Will Oldham and Come (naturally) make appearances. Like Half-Cocked, Radiation’s non-ending leaves us hanging, but lacking a proper ending doesn’t seem so bad a sin when the films are road movies; one gets a sense that Unai and Truckstop both keep on going, even if we get off early.
BUY: ‘Half Cocked’ DVD on Amazon.com
BUY: ‘Half Cocked’ soundtrack on Amazon.com
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