The Devil and Daniel Johnston

Daniel Johnston is one of those musicians that I am totally in awe of yet can rarely listen to. His recordings are plagued by notoriously terrible quality– levels jumping all over the place, vocals exploding at all the wrong times as he yells too close to the microphone. His piano playing is grating, to put it lightly. He exhibits no understanding or grasp of the powers of sound dynamics. He pummels the keys with an obvious ear for notes and melody, but it is drowned out by the sound of 10 drunken chimpanzees jumping up and down on the keys.
All said and done though, his words hit nerves, touch the heart, and drop the listener into that comfortable funk that one indulges in every now and again for the pure pleasure of feeling blue and helpless. He has serene moments, and when they hit everything meshes, it all comes together, and you get a song like "Walking the Cow", "Devil Town" or "Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Your Grievience." It is within those flashes of restraint and tidiness that makes it easy to understand why the man has garnered such a heavy cult-like following, disregarding his crippling manic-depressive mental state of course.
Sadly, there will always be a group of ‘fans’ who are into him for the simple fact that he is tragically apeshit. I admit myself that I am attracted to that facet of his art. The most troubled people tend to be utterly and enviously brilliant– Roky Erikson, Syd Barret, Wesley Willis, Crispin Glover, etc.– and that is an undeniable draw. They approach things from angles that we can’t even envision coming from, and, knowing their sometimes dire mental misfires, don’t really hope to be able to understand. We’re content to let them filter the world through their paisley/hell-tinted glasses and become spectators to a world that is likely rife with pain, confusion, and broken hearts; chemically broken minds.
What sets Daniel apart from say, Wesley Willis, who only really had 5,000 versions of one song, is the fact that he truly an impressive songwriter. Maybe not great, or stupendous, but he is sincere and that in itself goes along way towards validating him. While a person may be interested in seeing just how nuts Johnston can possibly get, a compelling car crash/ reality TV syndrome that is enveloping the planet as I sit here and type, there is always the obvious fact that the man wrote strangely beautiful songs
The film is admirable for the simple fact that it isn’t set-up as a freak-show type documentary. It was made by a fan and paints a portrait of a semi-normal and creative kid that collapsed into a quagmire of manic genius and ended up on a quest to be a world famous Rock Star while wrestling with the real or imaginary conviction that he was running from the Devil himself. Through commentaries by his patient yet obviously heart-broken parents, snap shots and films from his childhood and adolescence, and interviews with friends and fellow musicians you are drawn into his life and get a good sense of the chronology of the tragedy.
It’s a smoothly paced drama that unfolds like a well written novel, but what makes it so much more effective is that it is all true, laid out right in front of you on the screen. No actors, no lighting technicians, the only soundtrack his words and heartache, his ragged piano and his punched-up guitar.
Notable episodes are home video of Lee Renaldo and Thurston Moore driving around New York looking for Daniel after he freaked out and disappeared (they found him in a parking lot in Jersey) and Gibby Haynes recounting the Butthole Surfers show where some say Daniel finally went around the bend after taking acid and witnessing the insanity of a Butthole performance. For reasons that we may never understand, Gibby gave his interview while having his teeth drilled. It’s an amazing scene, more cringe inducing than any horror movie I’ve ever sat through.
But the real star, of course, is Daniel Johnston. From his days of being chastised by his mom for immersing himself in his art, to his peculiar days as an MTV oddity, to working at McDonalds, and the awesome story of when he escaped a mental hospital in New York and opened for fIREhose the same night through presumably equal parts of serendipity and stupendous determination. This is a tragic and achingly beautiful story of one man, one broken heart, one broken mind, and a crippling drive to become a superstar while frustratingly, uncontrollably, shooting himself in the foot on multiple occasions. It’s also a sympathetic look, worthy of deafening applause, into the life of a manic-depressive personality. The blinding exuberance and energy, followed by neck-snapping falls from the treacherous and unstable peaks of grandiosity and shaky self-confidence.
The Devil and Daniel Johnston will kick you square in the heart, if you have one, as it traces the rise, the fall, and the subsequent resurfacing of a driven, tortured artist. The beauty of it all is that he still garners respect and praise for his work, proving that he was more than a flash in the hipper-than-thou pan that temporarily embraces something kooky and then drops it when the next damaged object comes along.
His longevity, I feel, is tied to his overwhelming honesty and purity. When he sings his words of pain, suffering, and unrequited love you know it’s all true, not some rote, by-the-numbers lyric writing machine that pumps up everyday shit to make it seem more tragic (fuck you, David Grey) or makes commercially pleasant music trying to pull at your heartstrings with songs of beauty and grace that fail to impress due to their lack of sincerity or inventiveness, hanging on a musical hook, a well-coiffed, faux bed-head look (fuck you, James Blunt, Ryan Adams). That Daniel Johnston can pack a club, play 10 minutes, and have everyone cheering insanely for him to come back for more is a testament to the ability of the human soul to recognize sincerity, beauty, honesty, and true, unfettered genius. Sure, the aforementioned (aforecursed?) pop super-stars of the moment can do the same, but they’ll be gone soon enough, and one can bet, and it’s a cynical bet, that if they looked like Daniel Johnston, they wouldn’t be where they are today.
But what Daniel lacks in physical beauty he more than makes up for in his works, dropping heart-warming/wrenching sentiments like they were loose change in a ripped pocket. And we all know that the most beautiful people are, ultimately, beautiful on the inside, and in this case, underneath Daniel’s admittedly rough exterior, glows a heavily shackled angel that continues to struggle and love and sing out for all that is good, right, and wonderful in this world.

Haa gongol...

Blacula, Beeeyatch

A fine night indeed. I don’t know which idea came first: fried chicken and waffles for dinner, or a viewing of Samuel Z. Arkoff’s 1972 classic Blacula. Either way, both ideas collided, meshed, and harmonized in my mind once they were in there, together, and I decided that it had to be a combination of the two. One, a tribute to Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles , an L.A. landmark and heart-attack dispenser, and a Blaxploitation take on the legend of Dracula.
I stopped at the Hollywood Video on the way home from work. I don’t go there too often anymore since I found that they edited their movies for content without noting so on the box. Examples: Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy , Wadd: The Life and Times of John C. Holmes, and Auto Focus, the biopic on Bob Crane of Hogan’s Heroes. They seem to have a problem with sex. Violence is OK, rape is fine, child abuse, etc. Saw, A Clockwork Orange and Hostel are available in their un-rated formats, but thou shalt not portray excessive sex or show multiple images of gigantic penises.
I figured that they couldn’t get their puritanistic mitts on an old 70's flick, so I felt safe going this route, for the sake of convenience. I hit the grocery store after and picked up the goods–chicken, canola oil, flour, syrup, and lemons and headed home.
It was a quick job whipping up the fixings and then the Shoe and I sat down for some artery clogging goodness with an awesome film to accompany us.
For a bad movie, Blacula is pretty damn good. It beats the hell out of any other vampire movie I’ve seen, with the possible exception of Near Dark. I tend to avoid the genre because vampires always seem to be melodramatic, badly dressed weenies who mope around a lot and try to come across as sophisticates when really all they are is a weepy pack of velvet-wearing sociopaths. This film, however, gives us a pissed off African Prince who gets ‘converted’ by the original Count Dracula in 1780 when he visits Transylvania. In chillingly perfect English the Prince attempts to recruit The Count into an anti-slavery movement. The Count isn’t down with the whole ‘no slaves’ thing, the Prince is slighted, the Count is in turn slighted as well, and he ends up biting the Prince and locking him in a coffin to fiend for blood forever. He also leaves the Prince’s wife in the tomb with the Prince to slowly starve to death.
Fast forward a couple hundred years and we get two screamingly homosexual antiques dealers/ interior decorators who are buying everything out of the castle. They end up with the coffin, unleash Blacula, and you can figure out the rest.
Blacula finds a woman that looks like his wife and attempts to woo her, and she falls for him quite easily. They meet in a club that has the best performance of a band in a feature length film EVER. The Hues Corporation rocks the house with their funky brand of soulful disco pop stylings. Watch the back-up singer on the right (your right, dumbass). He is into it, giving it his all. He steals the damn show with his facial expressions and I am now on a quest to locate him and hire him on full-time as my own personal back-up singer to everyday life. He’ll go to work with me, ride the train, cook dinner, shoplift porn... whoops. Ixnay that last one.
Blacula appears to have done a lot of studying while locked up for hundreds of years. Maybe he received handbooks from vampires in the future on the state of things because he expresses no surprise whatsoever over being in down town Los Angeles. An African Prince, locked in a coffin for 200 years in Transylvania, which may as well be as African village (but with mono-brows), shows up in downtown L.A. and doesn’t once say, "What the fuck is this shit?" when he gets hit by a cab, or sees a building, or sees a telephone booth for that matter. He is one cool cat. Blacula ain’t fazed by a damn thing.
He also seems to have inherited some werewolf genes as well as his eyebrows grow into his sideburns and he grows those hideous patchy tufts of fur that malnourished and doomed people grow on their cheeks when they are trying to grow a beard and shouldn’t or are living on the streets and can’t shave off the unsightly growths. He goes from suave to goddamned ugly in the blink of an eye.
A periphreal character whom I fell in love with was some pseudo-pimp named Skillet, played-oh so-pimpishly by Jitu Cumbuka, who appeared in the club whenever anyone opened a bottle of alcohol. His only purpose seemed to have been to be a moochy turd and to say, "Say man, that is one straaaaaange dude" in reference to Blacula. I would like to nominate him for a lifetime achievement award regardless of the fact that no one has ever heard of him. A moochy pimp named Skillet? Genius, my friends.
The film also gives our world a great line to be repeated ad nauseam by bored teenagers and 20-something hipsters. It’ll be up there with, "Don’t have a cow, man!" and "Badges? We don’t need so stinking badges." It pops up when the cops discover one of the dead interior decorators has disappeared. They aren’t hip to the fact that they are being confronted with the living dead, so they treat it as a typical Los Angeles body-snatching. The chief of police quips, "Who the hell would want a dead faggot?"
The days before the P.C. bomb dropped were amazing things, the halcyon days of bigotry and intolerance. But fuck, even if it offends you, you have to admit that that line is the kind of gold actors yearn for.
One thing that piqued my curiosity was that all of the police officers wore helmets. Mind you, these weren’t motorcycle cops, but normal buddy cops driving around in cop cars. Every one of them had a helmet on. I’m going to look into that one and see what the requirements were for LA cops in the 70's.
So it was a great night of food, companionship and blaxsploitation. I had been putting off this movie for decades, but now that I’ve seen it, well, I don’t kick myself for never renting it before. I probably wouldn’t have appreciated it as much as a young boy. But now, it is cinema gold and I plan on renting the sequel, Scream, Blacula, Scream, as well as another movie I ran into while searching the shelves, Blackenstein. More to come on those in the future.

Just Another Day in the Saare

It was a typical day in the village during the hot season. I was doing everything I could do to avoid spontaneously combusting (the thermometer broke and jammed at 125 degrees Fahrenheit the week before). I was doing nothing but sitting, breathing shallow, and trying to avoid any contact with my own body, a feat that is as hard to accomplish as it sounds. The town was dead as it typically was in the middle of the day, everyone too hot and tired to risk the unrelenting violence of the Sun.
I noticed in the field behind the house, about 70 yards from where I was sitting, that a pack of elementary school kids were gathered beneath the big neem tree. I stopped doing absolutely nothing in order to observe them, because no matter where you are on this planet, a pack of school kids in a field on the outskirts of town, unsupervised and without any sort of sporting equipment, equals bad news. I’d been marveling at these particular children’s behavior for the past 15 months, and I never seemed to be able to get a grip on their amazing lack of consideration for their own safety or for the lives of anything that wasn’t human. They tortured and murdered anything frail and slow enough to be captured, they mouthed off to me no matter how many times I thumped them on the back or on the head, they sucked on used mercury batteries, they NEVER looked both ways before crossing the streets (adults were guilty of this too), etc. I was curious on this blazing and miserable day to add to my list of evil/stupid/repugnant things they did for lack of anything else to do, so I shifted in my sliver of shade and just watched.
They seemed to be excited and agitated about something, all clustered in a lump and constantly moving and screaming. From the center of their hooting and hollering pack a donkey broke free and bolted. A few kids swung at it with sticks and one of them lunged at the fleeing creature and trapped the rope that was tied around its neck. It never ceased to amaze me how fucking cruel they were to the donkeys. When pulling carts the drivers would routinely crack them on the flanks or spine, full force, with sticks that were as big around as an adult’s wrist, even if the poor beast was running as fast as it could. As the cliche goes, donkeys are as stubborn as an animal can get and they understandably aren’t too keen on dragging around heavy carts and plows. You’d think that after hundreds of years of beating them in order to motivate them, with no obvious results, that people would have given up and just started using packs of dogs to drag their shit around. That would make sense, but this was Africa where things never did ending up making any sense whatsoever to me, and people continued to beat the hell out of the donkeys out of sheer frustration. They lived miserable lives with a constant collection of open, oozing sores on their backs that never healed because they just kept getting hit.
I pitied all of the donkeys and considering this particular one’s situation I knew that he was in for a bad time. It was like the Rodney King beating, the kids kept at it, thwaking it, busting sticks over its spine, kids were all around shoving and pushing, punching it towards a culvert that went under the paved road. From my angle I couldn’t see into the culvert, but I knew that if the kids succeeded getting the donkey into it and out of sight of the entire town, then it was more than likely going to be in an even bigger, all encompassing world of shit than usual.
The donkey knew this as well and it wasn’t going to go easily. They had it surrounded, hitting and punching it from all sides and its hooves were dug in to the dirt pretty good, but it didn’t seem to be good enough. I wondered as I usually did why the damn things didn’t just start kicking and biting. They are big animals and can kick like a motherfucker. If it had thought for a second, it would have realized that it could have easily reared back and fucked all those kids up in a nanosecond and then leisurely pissed on their crippled and concussed bodies. Unfortunately all of the fight had been beaten out of the species; their DNA is now permanently encoded with a victim strand. It’s pretty sad.
Amongst the madness I noticed an adult in the group and confusion set in. Though the grown-ups beat the donkeys as well, they usually didn’t sink all the way into full blown and mindless torture. They were vaguely aware that donkeys cost money and that if you beat you means of transportation to death then you’ll be out a few bucks.
The guy turned and I saw who it was. The second I saw his face my dread for the donkey’s well being peaked. It was Doro, one of the seven or so mentally disturbed people that wandered about our little town. He was a big guy with a build that told me he could easily snap me in two if the urge struck him; could pop my pancreas with one well-placed punch. Every time I saw him he’d jump straight up in the air, land solidly with both feet wide apart, hold down his hat with both hands and scream, “Americain ” then go on about his business like nothing had happened. A friend told me that he routinely beat his mother and he was also compelled by some crossed neurological wire to write in a billowing, faux arabic script on walls and in the sand. Lately he had been collecting a ton of rocks, walking off into the bush and returning with his shirt cradling 20 or so pounds of the red laterite that made up our region of the country. He made piles of them all over town and I’m hoping I will be long gone when he finally decides to finalize whatever plan he has for them.
Seeing him with the kids and one terrified donkey that was being forced into a water drainage tunnel made my tongue get fuzzy and thick in the back of my mouth, the same reaction I get when I think about the taste of lemons. The donkey was almost out of sight now with Doro following the pack and I decided that I needed to go over and try to stop whatever it was that was about to happen.
As I headed towards the gate my brain was yelling at me. It had a hunch as to what was going on but I chose to ignore it. I didn’t really want to hear. I was content with thinking I was going to find the kids shoving needles into the donkey’s eyes or something innocent like that. I went out of the yard and headed down the road to the overpass. A few kids ran past me back into town, a few others upon seeing me coming yelled some warnings in Jaxanke that I didn’t understand.
I got to the overpass and one of the kids, a 9 year-old pain in my ass named Kow, stood below and said, “Amadou, come look.,” and pointed to the tunnel. I couldn’t see from above so I sidestepped down the steep embankment, knowing deep in my heart exactly what it was that I was going to see.
I looked onto the dark and there it was... Doro, pants around his ankles, holding the donkey’s tail up, and fucking it hard in the ass. Kow laughed and the kid holding the donkey’s rope dropped it and ran out the other side of the culvert when he saw me.
If ever there was something that I didn’t want to see, this was most certainly it.
I shook my head and uttered a long, breathy, “Christ,” and walked back up to the road, back towards home, thinking seriously about the bottle of hot cheap whiskey that was sitting on the shelf.
I was struggling with whether or not I should do something– a crazy, violent man humping a donkey. I put him in the same category with sleepwalkers, figuring it is probably beneficial for my own longevity on this planet to leave him be. An ass kicking I can take, probably, even on a hot day like this. An ass kicking by a psychotic man with a throbbing, donkey poop smeared penis was a whole other can of worms. Yes, I definitely had better things to do than have that as a story to tell as well.
I got back to the yard and saw that the donkey had escaped when the kid had dropped the rope, but the few brave souls who hadn’t fled with my arrival had recaptured the rope and were leading it back to the tunnel of love, presumably so Mr. Donkey Raper could finish up. It put up less of a fight this time, apparently resigned to its fate.
What are you gonna do? I’d bet that bestiality, while not exactly smiled upon or encouraged, isn’t in the law books here, so I couldn’t go to the cops. I couldn’t really hate the guy. His love affair with poopy donkey asses was really the least of his problems– he is, after all, ape-shit insane. The only real discomfort the donkey probably felt was the beating it endured to get it into the tunnel. I’ve seen donkey asses, they can accommodate a basket ball and a freight train traveling side-by-side. I couldn’t hate the country, mainly because that would be stupid, but also because people all over the world hump animals. It probably (I can’t pass judgement) isn’t right, but it happens.
Really, in the end the only people I could be upset with were those goddamned kids. They were the ones who drove it into the culvert. They knew better and it wouldn’t have happened (well, that particular time anyway) if they hadn’t pummeled and dragged the poor fucker (fuckee?) to its rendevous.
And even knowing that, having someone to put some blame and disappointment on, what am I gonna do? The only kid I recognized was Kow and his family hates me so I can’t go to them. There was no recourse. The donkey walked away and was eating weeds and cardboard seconds after the money shot. The kids all dispersed. Cassinova presumably went off to write on a wall somewhere, and I am now the unwilling and not to proud owner of a mental video depicting an insane man plugging away at a donkey as a group of sadistic school children cheered him on.

-March 8, 2005