Sucking and drinking
Sorry, had to work a lot yesterday, so I didn't finish my post. (Not that anyone noticed.) In penance, here are two reviews, plus a bonus: my uncut Secret Chiefs 3 interview. If you are near Chicago on Saturday night, get your dirty ass to Double Door for their show with Sleepytime Gorilla Museum - I swear you will not regret the effort.
"Leeches!"
(2003)
OK, I'll fess up: I am a heterosexual male who enjoys horror movies. I am glad that when horror movies aren't tossing blood or monsters at you, a lot of the time they're dangling an attractive woman or three, perhaps to remind anyone who spends as much time watching horror movies as I do that they could be out scoring. While a good deal of the horror film market is made up of heterosexual males, it's ridiculous to assume that there aren't plenty of homosexual male (or heterosexual female) horror fans who would prefer their eye candy to be masculine. Enter longtime exploitation filmmaker David DeCoteau, the man behind such direct-to-video winners as "Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama" and "Dr. Alien," both of which I own on laserdisc, and "Puppet Master III: Toulon's Revenge," generally regarded as the best in that series. DeCoteau also made a crapheap of porn under various pseudonyms, most or all of it gay according to undocumented internet sources. He came out of the closet during the '90s, and today he makes the occasional gay-themed indie drama along with a slew of teen horror pictures he distributes through his own Rapid Heart imprint. "Leeches!" is true to the Rapid Heart ideal, best described by one reviewer as "vacant twinks in underwear play-acting horror movie setups without any of the gore, violence, nudity, profanity, or drugs that make most genre movies interesting in the first place."
As you might guess, my problem with "Leeches!" has nothing to do with the amount of beefcake on display, which is a lot. Actually, I think it's very cool that DeCoteau is building a cottage horror industry tailored to gay audiences, which he likens to the way blaxploitation was aimed at black moviegoers in the '70s. My problem is that DeCoteau tailors these Rapid Heart pictures for a young audience, and as he repeatedly trumpets on his DVD commentary, he intentionally keeps his actors from getting nude, spilling their intestines and swearing very much. Horror is about transgression or mood, and there's little of either in "Leeches!" This is primarily a bog-standard story about a college swim team tainted by steroid abuse, the side effect being a horde of arm-sized leeches that appears after drinking the boys' blood. The leeches spend far more time climbing up the himbos' toned muscle masses than tearing the shit out of them - in these sequences, the leeches look like green rubber oven mitts. At least DeCoteau insisted on practical creatures rather than digital ones, and practically everyone dies. In fact, the couple you think are the protagonists die halfway through. However, that's just indicative of a plot packed with pointless characters doing pointless things. As a horror fan, I was disappointed by the flick's general chastity. I imagine anyone looking at it from a non-hetero point of view would be as well. Despite the thick homoeroticism, none of the characters are gay. Talk about trying to play for both teams...
"Les Raisins de la Mort"
(aka "The Grapes of Death," 1978)
This picture is probably just as boring as "Leeches!" to some people, but I find it much more gratifying. Now that I "get" French director Jean Rollin, who impressed me with "La Nuit des Traquées," this was the movie of his that I wanted to see next, a pseudo-zombie movie thankfully in print in America via Synapse Films. Rollin's got a better track record with vampires than with zombies, having also made the infamous "Zombie Lake." That piece of shit manages to be a bigger snoozer than even the other Nazi zombie flicks of its time, including Jesus Franco's awful "Oasis of the Zombies" and Ken Weiderhorn's overrated, PG-rated "Shock Waves." "Les Raisins de la Mort" is actually more like George A. Romero's "The Crazies" - its hordes of rotting attackers are not dead, just mentally degenerated and driven to murder by a phenomenon someone's trying to cover up. In this case, it's the fault of a careless vineyard who used a new, cheaper pesticide on its grapes. Anyone who drinks wine bottled by them will eventually start to physically decay and feel the urge to murder.
A French movie about evil wine? Has to be a satire, right? Not really, although there are a couple of hero characters who aren't infected because they prefer beer. No, Rollin plays it straight, following heroine Marie Georges-Pascal as she wanders the beautiful countryside, encountering one homicidal wine drinker after another. The cause of all the mayhem is not revealed until the last act, when Marie realizes her fiancé is both responsible and doomed, and although anyone watching "Raisins" will likely have already heard what it's about, the "mystery" doesn't take away from it. There's a decent amount of violence and nudity to spice up the proceedings, which admittedly unfold at Rollin's typically languid pace. However, the main draw here is a wistful, hermetic atmosphere, accomplished with Claude Bécognée's evocative cinematography and a cool vintage electronic score by Philippe Sissman. Best of all, there is a great bit part played by the uniquely gorgeous Brigitte Lahaie, who is quickly becoming one of my favorite cult actresses. At one point she appears flanked by two large dogs, an obvious homage to Barbara Steele in Mario Bava's classic "La Maschera del Demonio." Given proper time and attention by a viewer, this flick is more effective than most new-ish zombie movies I've seen, and there aren't even zombies in it.
"Leeches!"(2003)
OK, I'll fess up: I am a heterosexual male who enjoys horror movies. I am glad that when horror movies aren't tossing blood or monsters at you, a lot of the time they're dangling an attractive woman or three, perhaps to remind anyone who spends as much time watching horror movies as I do that they could be out scoring. While a good deal of the horror film market is made up of heterosexual males, it's ridiculous to assume that there aren't plenty of homosexual male (or heterosexual female) horror fans who would prefer their eye candy to be masculine. Enter longtime exploitation filmmaker David DeCoteau, the man behind such direct-to-video winners as "Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama" and "Dr. Alien," both of which I own on laserdisc, and "Puppet Master III: Toulon's Revenge," generally regarded as the best in that series. DeCoteau also made a crapheap of porn under various pseudonyms, most or all of it gay according to undocumented internet sources. He came out of the closet during the '90s, and today he makes the occasional gay-themed indie drama along with a slew of teen horror pictures he distributes through his own Rapid Heart imprint. "Leeches!" is true to the Rapid Heart ideal, best described by one reviewer as "vacant twinks in underwear play-acting horror movie setups without any of the gore, violence, nudity, profanity, or drugs that make most genre movies interesting in the first place."
As you might guess, my problem with "Leeches!" has nothing to do with the amount of beefcake on display, which is a lot. Actually, I think it's very cool that DeCoteau is building a cottage horror industry tailored to gay audiences, which he likens to the way blaxploitation was aimed at black moviegoers in the '70s. My problem is that DeCoteau tailors these Rapid Heart pictures for a young audience, and as he repeatedly trumpets on his DVD commentary, he intentionally keeps his actors from getting nude, spilling their intestines and swearing very much. Horror is about transgression or mood, and there's little of either in "Leeches!" This is primarily a bog-standard story about a college swim team tainted by steroid abuse, the side effect being a horde of arm-sized leeches that appears after drinking the boys' blood. The leeches spend far more time climbing up the himbos' toned muscle masses than tearing the shit out of them - in these sequences, the leeches look like green rubber oven mitts. At least DeCoteau insisted on practical creatures rather than digital ones, and practically everyone dies. In fact, the couple you think are the protagonists die halfway through. However, that's just indicative of a plot packed with pointless characters doing pointless things. As a horror fan, I was disappointed by the flick's general chastity. I imagine anyone looking at it from a non-hetero point of view would be as well. Despite the thick homoeroticism, none of the characters are gay. Talk about trying to play for both teams...
"Les Raisins de la Mort"(aka "The Grapes of Death," 1978)
This picture is probably just as boring as "Leeches!" to some people, but I find it much more gratifying. Now that I "get" French director Jean Rollin, who impressed me with "La Nuit des Traquées," this was the movie of his that I wanted to see next, a pseudo-zombie movie thankfully in print in America via Synapse Films. Rollin's got a better track record with vampires than with zombies, having also made the infamous "Zombie Lake." That piece of shit manages to be a bigger snoozer than even the other Nazi zombie flicks of its time, including Jesus Franco's awful "Oasis of the Zombies" and Ken Weiderhorn's overrated, PG-rated "Shock Waves." "Les Raisins de la Mort" is actually more like George A. Romero's "The Crazies" - its hordes of rotting attackers are not dead, just mentally degenerated and driven to murder by a phenomenon someone's trying to cover up. In this case, it's the fault of a careless vineyard who used a new, cheaper pesticide on its grapes. Anyone who drinks wine bottled by them will eventually start to physically decay and feel the urge to murder.
A French movie about evil wine? Has to be a satire, right? Not really, although there are a couple of hero characters who aren't infected because they prefer beer. No, Rollin plays it straight, following heroine Marie Georges-Pascal as she wanders the beautiful countryside, encountering one homicidal wine drinker after another. The cause of all the mayhem is not revealed until the last act, when Marie realizes her fiancé is both responsible and doomed, and although anyone watching "Raisins" will likely have already heard what it's about, the "mystery" doesn't take away from it. There's a decent amount of violence and nudity to spice up the proceedings, which admittedly unfold at Rollin's typically languid pace. However, the main draw here is a wistful, hermetic atmosphere, accomplished with Claude Bécognée's evocative cinematography and a cool vintage electronic score by Philippe Sissman. Best of all, there is a great bit part played by the uniquely gorgeous Brigitte Lahaie, who is quickly becoming one of my favorite cult actresses. At one point she appears flanked by two large dogs, an obvious homage to Barbara Steele in Mario Bava's classic "La Maschera del Demonio." Given proper time and attention by a viewer, this flick is more effective than most new-ish zombie movies I've seen, and there aren't even zombies in it.
posted by SoulReaper at 7:15 PM
1 Comments:
Arabian Flights: The stately return of Secret Chiefs 3
The Bay Area collective known as Secret Chiefs 3 play what may be called a sort of hybrid music. Although their sonic palette is astoundingly inclusive, they remain shrouded in mystery and obscurity. Their show this Saturday at Double Door marks their first Chicago appearance in nearly seven years.
The band's four albums exhibit influences from Persian and Arabian music, surf rock, spaghetti western soundtracks, death metal, experimental electronic music and more. The lineup has been in as constant a flux as the music, except for the man at the center.
Trey Spruance founded the group more than a decade ago with two fellow members of San Francisco genre-benders Mr. Bungle. Although having performed with the likes of avant-garde jazz composer John Zorn and funk/art metal pioneers Faith No More, Spruance's main musical concern since the apparent dissolution of Mr. Bungle remains Secret Chiefs 3. He oversees all aspects of their music, distributing recordings through his own Mimicry Records label.
Although laying dormant since 2004's Book of Horizons, Secret Chiefs 3 now prepares for a flurry of releases. Among these are an album by each of the seven individual configurations that Spruance says now make up the whole band, plus a new Secret Chiefs 3 album featuring the entire slate of musicians.
The following is an edited conversation with Spruance regarding his philosophies and how he applies them to his weird, wild, wonderful "band of bands."
Q: Can you explain the concept behind Secret Chiefs 3 to me? I've had a hard time explaining it to people who haven't heard you, like my editors.
A: Yeah, I wish there was an easy way to do it. I guess the best thing to say is that it's a band of bands. I like the ring of that: "Secret Chiefs 3, the Band of Bands!" (laughs) It kind of always has been, but I'm getting more explicit about it now and breaking it up into distinct, separate units, giving them names and all of that stuff. For this tour that we're doing, we're going to do a tour where we really, really do that in the fall, so this is sort of our last tour playing as just a normal band.
Essentially what it is is that there are different forces that operate... you know, as a creative musician, I find that something like surf rock expresses something a little bit better than trying to do it as a death metal thing. But there's a unity behind it, there's a unity of expression. You can change the modes of expression to illumine different aspects of that unity by calling them different bands. That's done sort of according to a traditional hermetic philosophical attribution - there are seven bands because there are seven planets, seven planetary metals and all this stuff. It gets pretty detailed and I'm pretty meticulous about it, but that's nothing to go into for an editor. (laughs)
Q: Do you consider the different types of music that go into Secret Chiefs 3 to be reflective of your personal interests, or that of everyone involved?
A: I guess I'll go ahead and call myself the dictator. Even the musicians who are involved are a rotating cast of characters depending on their availability. On this tour, we were able to bring out this guy named Piejman [Kouretchian] who's a really good metal drummer. We were only able to get him because [percussionist] Ches [Smith] had other commitments, but that gives us a chance to go into the stuff that's more on the heavy end of our spectrum. In a way, it's like you're attuning people to adapt the band to what parts of the music they're actually best at. I let that determine what the live thing is going to be, matching people's strengths up to what music we have in our repertoire.
Q: Who’s in the band this time?
A: Well, Piejman. Then there's Anonymous 13 (that's her name) on viola, then Timb Harris, who's on violin...
Q:From Estradasphere, right?
A: That's right, yeah. So you know this stuff. Jason Schimmel from Estradasphere is playing bass, Jai Young Kim is on keyboards, Rich Doucette is on sarangi and esraj and I'm playing saz and guitar.
Q: The last time you played Chicago, you were touring with Estradasphere and there was something like twelve people onstage at the end of the set.
A: It was way too much, man. (laughs)
Q: For this tour, you're all going to be on stage, you're not highlighting the individual bands?
A: We're saving that for next fall, because we really don't want to do that half-assed. We're going to do that for real next time. I figure it's more important to just give a good, solid set of music.
Q: I saw online that you are going to have four new seven inch records with you on tour. Why did you decide to do the seven inches rather than a full CD?
A: With these seven inches, I'm getting more specific about the different bands. There's becoming more of a difference between Secret Chiefs and these different bands as they take on a life of their own. The seven inches are the first official entry of these bands into their own individual entities, with albums on the way from each of them. I'm basically differentiating them from Secret Chiefs. The Secret Chiefs album [Book of Souls] is almost done and it's going to be out there later in the year, but before that, we'll get these other bands going.
Q: I think I understand what you're describing, but I'm still a bit unclear about this separate entities thing. Can you explain it a little more for me? I don't know if it's entirely clear to you yet, but can you break down the different aspects you're talking about?
A: Sure. It's crystal clear to me, it's just a fuckin' huge amount of shit to talk about. I can tell you, though, man. I can get pretty straightforward about it, I guess. FORMS is a band that sounds kind of like band organ music, or... I don't know if you've ever seen one those coin-operated pipe organ things that play on a piano roll. That we're doing for a reason that has to do with the neo-Platonic theory of emanation, that the world of material is inhabited or in a way haunted by life from above. So you have these sort of automatons being played almost like a computer program coming to life, but being done in material rather than digital bits.
That band, on the last album, Book of Horizons, was stating the primary themes for our trilogy, whereas on the next album, Book of Souls, Ishraqiyun is on the other side of that. If you visualize the FORMS band on one side and Ishraqiyun on the other side, almost like poles of an electromagnet with negative and positive poles, Ishraqiyun would be at the corresponding head of the negative pole. It will be having the primary themes for the next record. Essentially, The Electromagnetic Azoth is in between those two and below them. The next layer of bands below that is the Traditionalists, on the same side as FORMS, like on the positive charge, and UR is on the negative charge, the below half of the negative charge. Then Holy Vehm is in the middle below those, sort of like the whole thing is grounded into Holy Vehm.
On Book of Horizons, the themes are flowing from above to below, they're going down into FORMS going to The Electromagnetic Azoth, which is connected to all of them and redistributes the themes either in dissolution or adding something to them, then essentially going down into Holy Vehm where they're totally dissolved. On the next record, the themes are the other way around. The themes are coming from Holy Vehm and going upward, going into The Electromagnetic Azoth and then being redistributed that way.
Q: (long, dumbfounded pause) There are so many types of music going into what you do. As you said, there's surf rock and death metal, but there's also a lot of film score influence and various ethnic styles. Can you tell me about your interest in ethnic music?
A: Sure. It's funny. I mean, obviously I've listened to Persian and Arabic music, different music from the Middle East, but I can't really tell you that much about that music. I have never formally studied it. Well, I've studied Persian more than Arabic, but I haven't really gone into it that way, or even following different musicians. I came to it by a weird route (which I don't think is actually weird, but I don't know). I got really interested reading this guy Sohravardi, who was a philosopher from the eleventh century.
In his book "The Philosophy of Illumination" and a bunch of other attached pieces, he goes into musical theory that's very much in the neo-Pythagorean vein. It's really that neo-Pythagorean theory of harmony that got me fired up to explore the possibility of using different temperaments than Western temperaments. As I discovered the different instruments that could accommodate those kinds of harmonic modifications, I just became more and more accustomed to the way the rhythmic stuff would feel, the fact that melody and rhythm isn't really harmony, not Western harmony. The way the voice of the creative musician changes when you understand...
For instance, the seven band thing. Those are attributes that are strictly adhered to, they correspond with the attributes that are there, not just in Sohravardi but all Pythagorean-based music. The "music of the spheres" is the same general schema, so the attributes are there. If you study the hermetic doctrines, you start to get familiar with stuff if you look up what it means in the harmonic systems that are out there. Even today in Persian dastgah systems, you have corresponding attributions, you have fire, air, earth, water, that stuff is happening now in that music. It's not an archaic thing in classical Persian music, but it is kind of archaic everywhere else. I guess what I'm doing is not strictly an ethnic-based thing, but it's coming from the background from which different ethnic expressions of it are engaged.
Q: (another long pause) So, we haven't heard from you in a while. I know you've done some record producing (Tub Ring, Impaled). Is that where you've spent most of your time?
A: No, I've been working non-stop making albums for each of the separate bands and trying to finish the Secret Chiefs album. (laughs) You'll see, over the course of the next couple of years, the fruits of all of that labor are going to be... I won't say trickling out, because it's turning into a bit of an avalanche at this point. But that's all I've been doing, I've been working my fucking ass off. I tend to think a little bit too big about certain things, as you can tell. Like, how the hell are you supposed to have these seven different bands having separate identities? All these different musicians, pro musicians who need to be paid? Are you going to wait five, six years before you go out on tour again? (laughs) Well, that's what we’re doing, and watch. It will happen.
Q: Is Mimicry Records pretty much just you running things?
A: Yeah. We had some really, really cool stuff on that label. Like, the Estradasphere guys are playing in Secret Chiefs a lot of the time. It’s just that all the record label is is me doing it, and as you can imagine I get a little preoccupied doing other stuff. If I had somebody to help me run that fucking label, we could do a lot with it, but I just haven't found anybody.
Essentially, it's become a vessel for things I know are going to work, which is generally my stuff at this point. It's not fair to hold other bands' feet to the fire when I can't keep up with giving them what they deserve as working musicians. But it's been cool. I like the fact that these good bands have been able to launch off of our label and onto better labels. That's been a good thing.
Q: I know that former Mimicry band Dengue Fever played as part of the World Music Festival in Chicago last year, and that Estradasphere and Sleepytime Gorilla Museum have been picked up by The End Records. Has anyone come to you about releasing Secret Chiefs 3 material on another label, and would you consider it if they did?
A: It's happened, and I've been tempted a couple of times. It's a hard decision. I guess if an offer was really great. But you know, I'm trying to solve that, too. There's potential with these other bands to actually be a bit more focused. I like the idea of Secret Chiefs being the oddball thing that shouldn't be. You shouldn't be able to do it on this small level, to have these huge, grandiose productions and all of that. I mean, I like that. It's proof that there's magic in the universe. But the other shit? Sure. If Elektra/Nonesuch wanted to put out a fucking Ishraqiyun record, believe me, I'd be all over that.
Q: I imagine it's extremely tough to do it all on your own.
A: Yeah. But that's why I’ve been working for the last three years. I'm to the point where I have enough recordings where if it came to it and it was time to go, to just finish any of these records, I'm within a month of any of them. I'm in a pretty good position.
Q: How important is it for you to make memorable music, as opposed to "interesting" music?
A: It doesn't have any value to me unless it's memorable. If I'm going to sit here and sweat blood over making this stuff so meticulously, then it better have something going for it other than just being transiently interesting. I guess in a way, and it's such a fucking cliché, but if you're living and breathing the music, then it kind of has to nourish you in every way. I think a corollary of that is that a listener would hopefully find multiple levels of reward by listening to it. If that didn't happen, then I suck.
Q: Well, throughout the years, your music really got me interested in things I might not have otherwise. As a listener, I appreciate your having exposed me to so much.
A: That's great to hear, man. I believe in the imagination over everything. Not the imagination of just making up a fantasy and dreaming about fucking rainbows. The imagination to me is the key piece of the puzzle of perception, and if it's being vivisected by the way we tend to look at things in the modern world, I feel like an artist is a person who is actually in a position to... I mean, nobody's going to rescue it (laughs), but to at least demonstrate some of its potency and maybe what we might be missing by neglecting it and cutting it up into pieces.
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