Best of the Best

“Attention viewers,” reads the intertitle introducing Man with a Movie Camera, “This film is an experiment in cinematic communication of real events.” What follows, we are lead to believe, is the cinema of the real…

Around New Year’s in 2007 I took my first trip to New York City. A lot happened in the two weeks I was there, but the parts relevant here include stops at the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim. At MOMA I remember watching a short film capturing a Rube Goldberg machine called The Way Things Go. I was transfixed by it. It was raw, but exuded so much ingenuity; “real,” despite it being a wholly constructed staging of events. Then, at the Guggenheim, I was witness to the “most comprehensive and significant exhibition of Russian art outside Russia since the end of the Cold War.” The reds. The blacks. The darkness of it all, aesthetically and thematically. Many of the paintings I saw only continued to exist because they were hidden away during times where creative works were being destroyed en masse. It affected me in a very distinct way, impressing upon me a respect for how much art was used in the country as a counter-narrative to tyranny. Fast forward about 12 years and everything I felt during those experiences would find their spiritual relative in the form of Man with a Movie Camera.

“When this began rolling I thought I was in for an hour of actual silence,” reads the first line of a recap I wrote after my initial viewing of the film in March of 2019. “‘A great way to fall asleep,’ I thought to myself. Then the flicker of light, the direction of the composer, and the introduction of the soundtrack by The Cinematic Orchestra. Granted, Man with a Movie Camera wasn’t intended to be viewed alongside a score by a British jazz fusion duo, but then again it also wasn’t meant to be watched on a big ass flat screen in my living room while I lay on my couch in sweatpants.” For good or bad, this was my introduction.

The film, itself, becomes more impressive when considering the story of its creator Dziga Vertov, but that isn’t what first captivated me. And this is where I might lose any film purists, but the symphony of motion on display in Man with a Movie Camera was brought even further to life by the soundtrack I heard accompanying it, as provided by the aforementioned Cinematic Orchestra. Initially commissioned to score the film for a live performance, the music’s celebrated reception led to a full-blown album and DVD release, issued in 2003 to blend the film and music in perpetuity.

After first watching it the way I did, I can’t now view Man with a Movie Camera in its silent form, or even with any other orchestration accompanying it. I’ve tried. To me, the film is tied to the music, and the music is now tied to me. For the next half-year following my first viewing, I watched the film monthly. And over the past five years since that first viewing, I’d wager that there isn’t an album I’ve listened to more than Man with a Movie Camera. I’m not much of a collector these days, but I do have the original Ninja Tune DVD. And this past January I bought a 20th anniversary special edition vinyl release of the album (signed, no less). I can’t think of a piece of music that has wormed its way into my life in recent memory quite the way this has.

One hundred years after the fact, we continue to find ourselves at odds with technology, much the same way I envision Vertov did in his day. A more recent struggle comes with the ambiguity surrounding how to define what a photograph even is, among an age of technological wizardry that can remove a rendered image so far away from its source that it no longer relates to the lifescape it purports to have captured. Man with a Movie Camera challenged not merely what reality is, but whether such a thing could even exist in celluloid form. All throughout the film, what is captured and related is three-fold: footage of events, footage of the events being filmed, and film of the events after being edited. The combination brings about an otherworldly presentation of every day life in a way I’ve never really seen before or since.

The editing truly was ahead of its time, and the collage of humanity on display was as brazenly avant-garde as anything that would follow in its footsteps for decades to come. I don’t fancy myself much of a movie critic, but when considering all the different aspects of Man with a Movie Camera‘s production, I can’t help but wager that it’s one of the most historically relevant pieces of cinema created. If it hadn’t existed, one can only imagine how long it would have taken for the film world to catch up, if it even would’ve. To quote the film’s Wikipedia entry, “Man with a Movie Camera is famous for the range of cinematic techniques Vertov invented, employed or developed, such as multiple exposure, fast motion, slow motion, freeze frames, match cuts, jump cuts, split screens, Dutch angles, extreme close-ups, tracking shots, reversed footage, stop motion animations and self-reflexive visuals.” All of that was delivered unprecedented in this one single 68 minute long creative behemoth.

Vertov held an anti-fiction vendetta, hell-bent on creating a “real” work that would capture and dazzle with more creative imagery than any fictional work of its time ever could. The execution of this vision was immaculate, as was its soundtrack which followed some 70 years after the fact. What better compliment is there for a film score than to say it helps make the film itself better? Perhaps saying that without it the film has, for me at least, now become unimaginable.

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In November of 2017 I penned a goodbye to the Tragically Hip’s frontman Gord Downie. At the time I explained a bit of backstory about the band and my relationship with them, which applies here, as well,

“The Tragically Hip wrote most of their enduring anthems before the five members of the group were out of their twenties, and by the time I bought my first Hip album (1996’s Trouble at the Henhouse) they were a decade in to their recording history and had already come to represent the country, in a sense. […] They also flirted with mainstream American exposure, having experienced minor Billboard success with the 1993 release of ‘Courage (for Hugh MacLennan)’ and an appearance on Saturday Night Live in 1995. A few years after Henhouse, they played 1999’s Woodstock reboot.

In my life the band has always been ‘big,’ but I can’t remember a time when their accomplishments didn’t feel somewhat diminished. It’s like there’s always been a cloud looming over them, comparing their accomplishments to some ideal larger sense of success, fueled by their ongoing inability to become every bit as popular internationally as they were domestically. I remember growing up with that perverted idea ingrained in me, that in some ways to be successful in Canada you had to be successful outside Canada. Yet despite these opaque boundaries surrounding what it means to be Canadian (or a success in Canada), the band represented the country well.”

I’m writing this several days removed from watching the multi-part documentary series directed by Gord’s brother, Mike, called No Dress Rehearsal (which borrows a line from the song “Ahead By a Century” from the band’s aforementioned album, Trouble at the Henhouse). Despite thoughts and feelings from that viewing still being so fresh, this song and this album were pivotal for me in ways I find hard to put words to; it has a lot to do with identity and self-acceptance, I suppose.

The album, and in particular its first two singles, planted seeds that would later help nudge me away from a position of nationalistic self-rejection. As a Canadian child born to American parents, I grew up feeling a sense of diminished identity, partially due to my own bloodline, partially due to a value imparted and embraced by the culture itself that Canada is somehow less than, even when it’s not. I say this recognizing it could just be a “me thing,” though numerous times over it was focused on and pointed out in No Dress Rehearsal. Throughout the documentary various voices commented on how the Canadian press and media would detract from any mention of the Tragically Hip’s success by noting their failure to attract or achieve the same level of fanaticism stateside, as if to signal a broader level of failure because of it. Trouble at the Henhouse started a change within me relating to that concept of insufficiency. With time, it helped inspire a belief that the nation’s cultural output wasn’t lesser than simply because it wasn’t American. And if I were to believe that, it might also hold true that maybe there was nothing less than about myself, either.

“…We’re forced to bed
But we’re free to dream
All us humans extras
All us herded beings
And after a glimpse
Over the top
The rest of the world
Becomes a gift shop…”

My continued admiration for the music of the Tragically Hip comes in large part from a lifetime’s worth of exposure to their songs and the totality of lived experience along the way. This certainly holds true when considering “Gift Shop.” I have vague memories from different times that I’ve heard it, moments captured like a faded Polaroid in my mind. But there’s something else going on with it that I now hear which is bigger than the song, itself.

Within a year of its release, Trouble at the Henhouse sold more than 650,000 copies in Canada. To compare its popularity (when accounting for population), that’s akin to 1997’s album sales in the States from acts like Biggie, Metallica, or Hanson. The Hip were big. And I feel that big-ness in “Gift Shop.” But I also feel and hear a sense of small. Maybe it’s a sense of healthy deflation or a right-sizing of the ego. Within the song I hear a call for corrective measure while a sonic pendulum does indeed swing, reminding me to embrace my own unimportance amid a sound so large. Therein lies a critical connection. To me this song celebrates a healthy side of the importance conversation. We are not small because of the results of our efforts, or how they might compare to those of others, or because of where we were or weren’t born, but because we are all small when recognizing how truly mammoth the universe is that exists outside our limited reach. Once we understand that, holding onto any measure of self-importance becomes no different than grasping a hold of a trinket or nicknack one might pick up from a roadside gift shop. A healthy soul has little use for such artifacts.

About a third of the country watched the band’s final concert. I watched that night, too. It was an evening of sorrow and celebration I shared with a friend, and certainly one I won’t soon forget. “Gift Shop” was the penultimate song the band played together. I can’t help but hear all of this now. And I can’t help but feel all of this now. And with any luck, that feeling will remain with me when I hear “Gift Shop” for many years to come.

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Within each gateway resides another; a step before the step, leading back to something resembling an original source. The beginning of it all. In this case, the gateway to the gateway came in the form a song on my local classic rock radio station – CJAY 92, 92.1 FM in Calgary – or, as will be a recurring theme with this series, a music video on MuchMusic. One or both of these portals opened my eyes “I Was Wrong” from Social Distortion’s 1996 full-length release, White Light, White Heat, White Trash. This album, itself, would prove to be another gateway: This time to an entire reservoir of back-catalog material from the band, wonderfully encapsulated by a live album released some two years later simply titled, Live at the Roxy.

Growing up, I rarely saw live music. The number of concerts I’d been to by the time I turned 18 could be counted on a single hand, but live albums served a particularly critical role in my life. This was particularly true early on for me, before I was of age or had access to see more live music in person, particularly around the late-’90s, particularly around the time I was honing my chops as a Social Distortion fan.

I was a great student until I reached a point where I stopped caring. In the wrong hands, stubborn indifference can become a dangerous trait. Prior to starting high school I was introduced to the idea of a work study program students could enroll in as an alternative to classroom work. Once I got to high school that became the path forward for me. In the 11th grade I started working in a chef’s apprenticeship rather than attending school; or, I should say, I worked part of the year and went to school part of the year. That’s less important than what it provided me, which was an early introduction to adulthood.

For good or bad, I was exposed to a new way of living that suited me well at the time. Loaded with a fragile ego and a desperate desire to find acceptance I found a group of people in the kitchen that felt something closer to a tribe than anything I’d experienced at school. It was an eclectic group of misfits with varying degrees of behavioral and emotional issues; the type of which almost serve as a pre-requisite for working in a kitchen. For whatever experience I was missing out on by not being in a school, and making friends with people my own age, I felt I was more than making up for by rolling with this crew of barely employable kitchen staff. They invited me to house parties and smuggled me into bars as if I were just one of the gang despite my age. It was as close to a feeling of belonging as I’d felt in a long time.

I worked in that restaurant for about two years and during that time was introduced to a vast array of music that would stick to my bones like sap to a tree. Of all the people that have come and gone in my life, I still remember many of those cooks’ and what they were into in those years. There was Adam, who I worked with as a prep cook for several months, who would many times show up to work not having slept, still physically humming from the previous night’s rave. He and I would bond over stuff like the Prodigy, despite him being more into happy hardcore; a sub-genre that never remotely endeared itself to me. Then there were the two line-cook openers who both stood well over six feet tall and would trade off between playing opera and the Dead Presidents soundtrack. The one artist they could both agree on, however, was Wesley Willis, of all people. There was Rick, the closing kitchen manager, who reinforced my blossoming appreciation for Henry Rollins, and the daytime manager Steve, who I worked directly under for my apprenticeship. Steve was, if memory serves me right, largely indifferent to what was being played on the food-encrusted boombox, but I remember one particular exchange with a friend of his that impacted me immensely. One day I was back in the prep kitchen listening to Live at the Roxy while studiously julienning onions (or some such task) and a friend of his who’d recently started working as a line cook (after being released from jail, I want to say – though I’d hate to cast aspersions) came back and asked by how I knew about “Social D.” I think I said I’d heard them on the radio and he was blown away. Social D was on the radio now. What a world. But more importantly, this left me feeling like I was part of some sort of secret society. I had passed a cool test. Man, if that isn’t a moment I’ve been chasing my whole life since, I don’t know what is.

Things progressed from there. I loaded up my collection with whatever tapes and CDs of theirs I could find, and learned to love the sonic blend they presented, straddling a line between punk and twang. It wasn’t rockabilly, but it wasn’t what I understood to be punk at the time, either. “When She Begins” was an early favorite of mine, and remains a song indicative of the band for me despite their earlier sharper sound.

Several years later when I landed in college I picked up a White Light, White Heat, White Trash t-shirt from a Hot Topic. I held onto that one for a while and in turn it continues to hold a strange space in my memory. It was what I was wearing for my one and only mugshot, for example, and in some ways the shirt began to represent a specific way of living for me, beyond the music. It represented a period of time or, knowing the band’s catalog, you might say, another state of mind. The shirt made the trip back up to Calgary with me when I returned to the city for a brief stint in early 2010. I wasn’t there long and disappeared like a ghost in the night six months later, leaving behind a trail of broken relationships and a smattering of personal belongings. The shirt hung there in my living space, pocketed in the corner of a friend’s unfinished basement where I was staying. Similarly, it was probably around that era where I grew detached from the band’s music. All of it felt akin to where I’d been, not where I heading.

Live at the Roxy isn’t something I return to often, nor is Social Distortion a band that still remains in heavy rotation for me, but my god this album is an emotional time capsule. In 2007 I typed up some thoughts about the album for someone else’s blog, but looking back on those words now I feel like my view of the album and why it continues to mean something to me have changed. Today, listening to the cigar-chawing t-shirt salesman flap his mouth in the introduction, or hearing Mike Ness verbally stroll through a politically incorrect memory lane, I’m filled with very specific brand of nostalgia. Where this album once served as a window into a renegade lifestyle, with Ness’ magnetic presence welcoming me into a world of “junkies, winos, pimps, and whores,” the music now bears an unmistakable level of fun for me. It’s a celebration of survival.

That sound – that feeling – was never replicated for me despite trying to find a similar connection to Ness’ solo albums, or Social D’s late-career releases. Much of the band’s music helped pave a path forward for much of what became “alt-country,” and no longer feels dangerous to me, but instead feels somewhat dated. I don’t mean that in a negative way, but in the sense that it feels emblematic of a different time. To a large degree Social Distortion was the soundtrack for a past iteration of my life and a different version of myself. Despite the details of the songs’ content, Live at the Roxy captures a victorious feeling of solidarity, with Ness taking a mid-set beat to bask in the success of the album that exposed many like myself to the group, celebrating White Light‘s gold record status in a room full of fans, sharing his appreciation and reflecting on the hard road the band took to get to that point. Sitting in my room around the time it came out, I remember listening to those moments of recorded stage banter ramblings feeling like I was on the inside. What a feeling that is. When you find something that feels so welcoming, no matter how much time changes things, and we change with time, it can be hard to let go.

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For years this was our movie. I don’t know if we ever owned a copy of it, but it was 2002/2003 when a clerk at a Family Video in Bettendorf, Iowa told us to check it out. Rentals were a dollar. It was a great investment. I didn’t live in Bettendorf, but was with a college friend on a weekend trip (or something like that) back to his parents’ place. The visits came and went, but the movie stuck with me ever since.

In the supplemental features on the Blu-ray, Janeane Garofalo (interviewed at the time of filming) has a throw away comment about how Wet Hot American Summer could become a generation’s Caddyshack. I think she was right. Had Netflix existed twenty years ago in the form it does now, maybe they’d have rebooted Caddyshack as an original series that couldn’t have possibly satisfied diehard fans of the original, as was the case for me with the series they rolled out a few years back. As is though, the original Wet Hot has developed into something like a comedic Bible for me: For ages I would do my best to spread The Good News™, advocating for others to open their hearts to its unique brand of bizarre. “Oh, fuck my cock” isn’t exactly scripture, but it had a greater impact on my life than any Bible verse ever did, when casually leaked from the lips of an actor I only knew as the tightly wound Niles Crane to that point in my life. The movie has countless moments just like that which I’ve carried with me ever since my first viewing. The list of ways it’s influenced my own comedic tastes are boundless, but Wet Hot American Summer also skewed progressive and thoughtful with cutting views on topics ranging from homosexuality to male friendship and self-acceptance, all the way down to Beekeeper kid-types who would seed a forthcoming podcasting boom, lampooning quirky loners dying for an audience without a shred of desire to do the work to find that audience. There’s a lot actually packed into its 90 minute run-time.

Wet Hot was also my introduction to the Michaels. I say that, but my mental timeline is probably a little off: I remember Michael Ian Black from VH1’s Best Week Ever, but through this movie I later became aware of Stella, leading me to follow along with releases of grainy, low-res web series clips online and telling anyone who was willing to listen to me about my discovery. I loved Michael Ian Black’s 2007 album I Am A Wonderful Man, but it was Michael Showalter’s release from the same year called Sandwiches & Cats that landed me a brief online brush with greatness. In keeping with the times, I’d written a brief blog post about one of Showalter’s tracks I’d been keeping on repeat called “Erotica,” calling it “pretty much the musical equivalent to Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou… only better.” As with most blogging from that era, it was a hastily thrown together idea posted with lax editing and a casual regard for its consequences. I couldn’t have foreseen what happened next.

Questionable as the content or its delivery might have been, it crossed the desk of someone at Comedy Central who was spearheading a campaign to market the album online. “In the future,” read the promotional kick-off, “tours to promote new comedy albums will be simply injected into our consciousness along with our daily mind-control serum and Soylent Nutrition. But in the present, promotional tours have moved from record stores to blogs. At least that’s the case with Michael Showalter’s new album Sandwiches & Cats, which releases today. That’s right, Michael Showalter will be invading a slew of the internet’s most beloved weblogs today with the singular goal of convincing you, the consumer, to consume his record.” That included my blog, where Showalter wrote an article responding to mine in a sort of digital call and response. I was such a huge fan of his at the time (still am!), and loved so much about all the different projects he was working on in those years. However small a moment that was, it remains a lifelong blogging highlight for me. I ended up going to Black and Showalter’s show in Minneapolis at the Pantages Theatre, but as was customary at the time, my over-indulgences left me with little recollection of the event thereafter. C’est la vie.

All of this isn’t to mention the brilliance from cast members the likes of Christopher Meloni, Paul Rudd, or Molly Shannon, who each made Wet Hot what it was. It’s truly an ensemble production and without each of its individual components and contributions it surely wouldn’t have been what it was and has since become. What a strange movie to carry so much influence in someone’s life, but I’ve endlessly quoted this thing since college and still look for that ability in others as shorthand for being “my kind of person.” This movie built a tribe to which I feel I belong.

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“Good frames won’t save bad paintings.”

It was either on a show called The Wedge or Loud on MuchMusic where I first saw the music video for “New Noise.” It was an epiphany wrapped in a hurricane of sound. I don’t think I’d experienced anything like it before, and my hunch is many hadn’t. There was an unseriousness to its creepy vibe that I loved and an explicit dedication to exhausting the band’s capacity to aural annihilation which blew me away. Near the start of the video drummer David Sandström plugs his ears. I still don’t think that was for show.

Why is “New Noise” my selection here and not The Shape of Punk to Come? This song, and maybe a few others like “Coup D’Etat” and “Refused Are Fuckin’ Dead,” are the only Refused songs I really listened to before finding out about singer Dennis Lyxzén’s (at the time) newer band the (International) Noise Conspiracy, and leaning in on them. In hindsight, the move checks out with a larger trend of picking up on groups that fell in line with the garage rock revival of the early aughts, and T(I)NC was no exception.

In 2003 I moved back home after my freshman year at University and signed up for a year of community college, living with my parents north of the Twin Cities. While I was there, I opted for a couple electives I figured I’d enjoy, rather than a course roster focused on enriching my post-collegiate professional pursuits. This included a class in the history of pop music, or rock, or something like that, taught by an instructor named Jocko. I don’t remember much of anything from my academic career as an undergrad, but I do remember that class and I do remember Jocko. Another thing I remember is that one of the assignments in his class was to go to a live music event and write a review of it. For my assignment I went to the Triple Rock Social Club in Minneapolis and wrote about the (International) Noise Conspiracy.

The show’s openers were a band called the Boss Martians and another called the Rogers Sisters. For years to come I kept a few of their songs in rotation (tracks I’d likely scored from… I want to say a website called “Insound,” but I don’t think that’s quite right – it was something like mp3.com which provided a low quality downloads, typically from unsigned or independent artists). I don’t have any real memory from the night of the show, but I seem to recall my review of it spanned several pages. For being as nearly illiterate as I was in my teenage years, editorial restraint wasn’t a muscle I’d yet developed. I don’t remember what he told me or if he liked anything I wrote, but Jocko didn’t hate it, as I recall, and that gift of low level validation propelled me forward as I stepped back out of community college and returned to the school where I’d spent the previous year.

I wrote just three articles for Buena Vista University’s newspaper, but all three were about music. The last was a recap of my favorite albums of the year (it was 2004 and my top three featured: Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Abattoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus, and Tom Waits’ Real Gone — for someone with as questionable a taste in music as I’ve had historically, I’m amazed at how un-cringe those selections actually are); the second was a review of Björk’s Medúlla; and the first was a review of T(I)NC’s Armed Love. I just re-read the review for the first time in nearly 20 years and it’s not that bad. Surely it’s no seven page concert review manifesto, and double-surely it was aided with the help of an actual editor, but at the time it was published I was appalled my writing had been stripped of what I thought the point of it was, and furious at the headline that had been slapped on it: “Music that cares about you.” It was so cornball and I was offended I hadn’t been consulted about it prior to publishing, not knowing whatsoever that this is how all publishing of its kind works everywhere. Turns out, the title makes sense if all you knew about the album was what I’d written about the album. I guess that’s how these things work. I’ll save you a rant of how this band single-handedly inspired an early bend toward socialism in my life, and just come back around to saying that all of this came as a direct result of hearing “New Noise.”

My family moved to the States shortly after I’d graduated high school and with no prospects of pursuing higher education I spent a the majority of a year working across a couple warehouses (after which I decided that maybe this whole college thing deserved another look). The first work I got was a sketchy cash-under-the-table job at this furniture company that was “going out of business” for several months, while they funneled in new merchandise they were actively purchasing and “marked it down” against artificially inflated retail prices. While there, I worked with this guy about my same age named Nick, and on more than one occasion I remember sitting in his truck and maxing out the volume to “New Noise.” We shared an appreciation for it and when you’re 18 liking the same somewhat obscure song is more than enough of a reason to become friends. In hindsight, sitting in a suburban parking lot while wreaking of weed and cranking the stereo to its limit was most certainly a thoroughly obnoxious move, but at the time it just felt so good. Broadcasting myself as a fan of this kind of music made me feel cool. I guess it still does. And to this day I don’t think “New Noise” can, or should, be played quietly.

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