Sabotage Cafe - Film #2

Ride, Kamikaze Girls, Ride!

A rather drab weekend of movies, including covering UNDERDOG for another "ahem" employer. At any rate, I figured since I need cheering up I'll write about the movie that rocked my world awhile ago, KAMIKAZE GIRLS, recently screened at the Asian Film Festival.

I mention all this because KAMIKAZE GIRLS has given me the strength to keep climbing as an artist, which is a weird thing to say in regards to a manga-based pop art comedy about the friendship of two rural Japanese oddball teenager chicks. And this isn't I, may stress, one of those Japanese biker chick movies geared towards "ahem" Japenese businessmen whose level of repression demands maximum transgression, if I may coin a phrase. No, very little violence (except a few very unsexy beat-downs) and no sex and only one ripple of failed romance... not even hints of frustrated lesbian desire... NOTHING like that, and it's sooo refreshing... this is a story meant for teenagers about staying true to your eccentricities and your friends above all, but it also reaches out to all us freaks in the world of art, writing, video, fashion, etc., who are continually at odds with making money vs. compromising, or working behind the dream machine apparatus and therefore losing half the magic of the dream vs. keeping it all as a sacred hobby.

One of the girls is a fashion plate dancing to her own "French Rococo Period" drummer, the other is a cycle punkette. Rather than forming a clique to fit in, the girls stay iconoclasts to the end; they ride alone, together. They come across as titans of genuine female teenager characterization in a cinema so utterly bankrupt of same that when a movie that makes a halfway effort, like MEAN GIRLS, it reaps decades of accolades. The artistic rescue sequences play like slow poison to the viewer’s artistic insecurities. You leave the theater realizing you have just been given the courage to go on and so your vices suddenly seem very uncool (neither of these girls drinks or does drugs. “Not even solvents?” one of her biker friends asks, surprised).

Not even solvents, man. Did I mention I quit smoking?

Off they ride now... off to new adventures in fashion and bicycle chain beating. Ride, Kamikaze Girls, Ride!

The Sabotage Cafe

So I finished the series of films I did for Josh and his Sabotage Cafe, now available at L'amazon and al libre store nearst thee. There are 5 videos total, each about 3 minutes in length, snapshot video letters home to mom from a runaway street punk/urchin in Minneapolis.

Mandy Richchi plays la punkette and her performance is riveting in a way I hope people will appreciate; I hope it won't slip by them because it is so natural. We've been so worn down by the reptition of certain styles of characterization that when a true original comes along it burn us. You can hear and feel between the cracks of infinity when you gaze into the glistening light reflection on her eyes- and in the way her voice chokes down the pain and anxiety of separation from mom and home with the bravado of booze and youthful exhuberance. Richichi is a student at Pratt, part of a gang of young writers who read Proust and Pynchon the way lasers cut through buttered souls; they make my spine tingle when I'm at their semi-monthly readings and I feel the connection their energy is making to great literary eruptions that have gone on in the 1970s and 1950s and 1940s in dank basement bookstores and caffeine-shuddering coffee shops in Brooklyn and the Bowery. These guys and girls are all on equal footing, all fucked up and furious and fantastic. A few of these cats are in the videos, and the Swing Heils, a screaming, raging, tear your throat open in brotherly catharsis sort of thing. It's beautiful.

In case you are wondering why I'm rambling on like this, I'm attempting to write a back of a Blue Note jazz LP cover for the videos. If you've ever read a Blue Note jazz LP back cover, then this will ring a ding your bell. If you haven't read one, go do so. Blue Note's been reissuing a lot of their catalog on vinyl, but wait, who am I working for here? Right, Sabotage Cafe... Thanks to the man Joshua Furst, who wrote the book and asked me to do the project, and to Knopf for helping make it happen and putting the book out there and trusting me with total creative freedom. Thanks and shouts and love and mad respect for Mandy, for her man Gabriel Sorell, and the love pilotlight that kept the whole project blazing, Lucette Blodgett -- who even slathered in sad clown punkette greasepaint shines with holy light and who also anchored me as assistant director. When there was just two footprints in the sand, that was her holding the string while I flew o'erhead ala Marcelo in 8 1/2. Most ESPECIAL thanks to the Gates crew, Christopher "Red" Martiny, Chris Sweeney, those other cats. They let their pad disintegrate into ruin just for the shoot and it couldn't have been better and they rock; thanks to Kathleen Parker, and if I forgot anybody else, I'm sorry, I quit smoking and my hands are greasy from popcorn.

The thought here is to upload one of the videos a week, a sort of weekly video letter home from this runaway punk chick to her mom back in Plymoth, MN. It's tough to say if she grows up or the world grows down or what happens over the 5 weeks. What's in the film's not necc. in the book or vice versa. My style is different from Joshua's, and neither of us were gonna stand in the way of anything Mandy and Lucy wanted to do - in other words all of us respected each other's thing... and so it all just worked. I think. Or you tell me. Buy the book, too, and visit www.sabotagecafe.com.

The She-Wolf gets her Man: Frank Sinatra & Betty Garrett

Most romances in musicals follow one of two patterns: either the boy chases the girl and gets her, or the girl chases the guy and scares him away (poor Martha Raye!). But in two special musicals, On the Town and Take Me Out to the Ballgame, this mold was broken. Betty Garrett and Frank Sinatra shucked convention let the brassy, tell it like it is, slightly older, aggressive "woman" (as opposed to girl) finally get her man... and in this case the man was Frank. Double score!

Betty Garrett was a fine singer and dancer who went on to appear regularly on TV in shows like All in the Family (Edith's sister?). As for Frank Sinatra, one might initially think he'd squawk at being the pursued, but the choice was a canny one if you know the history behind it: During wartime, Sinatra was a radio constant and the women waiting at home for their solider boys swooned over his dreamy vocals, to the potential fury of the guys overseas, listening to the same broadcasts on army radio. Whether it was ace spin doctoring or just a running gag, the potential for jealousy was diffused by playing up Frank's skinniness and lost little lamb demeanor; gals could then adore him because he brought out their "mothering instinct" more than sexual desire. "Mothering instinct" is a phrase Garrett uses in each of these films.

On comedy shows like Fred Allen or Jack Benny, Frank was always being carried off by sudden winds or mistaken for a broom and locked in the janitor's closet, again emphasizing his 4F status, his inoffensive charm guaranteed to keep the girls warmed but chaste til the boys got home. There was a certain amount of this "mothering instinct" business still lingering in his roles for MGM even after the war (it would continue until he remolded himself as a serious actor in From Here to Eternity) in 1953.

In each film, Betty Garrett swoons at first sight over that "skinny little runt" and chases him around, belting out grand tunes and braying her intentions none too subtly as Frank runs and hides or sings meek responses of the "slow down and go away" effect. But in each film there is a magnificent turning point where Frank transubstantiates himself from copper to gold, where her changes from a 4F "mama's boy" to an early version of the rat pack razzle-dazzler who'd soon be ruling the roost at the Vegas Sands. Garrett responds to this change with a swoon, going from pursuer to deliriously submissive as Sinatra steps into the dominant role (with her support and approval).

In Take Me Out to the Ballgame this change comes after the big "Strictly USA" number. Frank's just tried to kiss Esther Williams, whom he adores because he saw her field a mean grounder to first. She kisses him back for a second, but it's apparently a flop. "No kick in it, hah?" Frank says. Hey, Frank's cool; he understands if there's no kick there's no kick. So then he transubstantiates his defeat as Frank the emaciated crooner into Frank the Vegas ratpacker, and says "C'mere, you" to Garrett--who's been chasing him like Robert De Niro in The Fan all this time--and gives her a big wet one. "Any kick in it?" he asks. You bet there's a kick in it. She loves it. (Read those last two sentences like Robert Evans for maximum effect - "you bet there's a kick in it").

In On the Town, Frank the sailor has fallen in much the same way with Garrett's extroverted NYC taxi driver. All the time he's resisting her and being coy, the innocent sailor abroad whose not used to brassy New York lassies. But then he lets Garret takes him up to her apartment for a nap (!) but her sneezy roomate is there. After some hilarity has subsided and the roommate's been sent to the movies, and you've been led to believe all this time that Frank's just kibbitzing, he suddenly drops the mama's boy veil and behold! Vegas Frank! He grabs Betty, who swoons into his arms.

In each case we have a romance begun by the woman, who is considered--relatively speaking--the less attractive of the pair. Sinatra was still a heartthrob after all and Garrett is deliberately playing up the "strong" aspects of her persona. So Frank's alchemical crossover is a result not just of a wiseguy getting hip to the situation and grabbing the gold--or in this case settling for the bronze-- but of Frank the actor/artist wriggling free from conventions of character, both as the scrawny crooner who draws out the mothering instinct and as the second fiddle to Gene Kelly.

In a way, Sinatra and Garrett's romances in these films forge a link to the comedies of Shakespeare, where not just the hero and the princess get married, but also his valet and her handmaiden, who represent a rough reversal of the traits of the lead two, the hierarchy does not devalue any of its members, but rather all members are considered to be at the level of the king so long as they are in accord with the king (and thus are reflections of his kingdom). I would go so far as in this case to say that Frank even surpasses the king, for while old Gene Kelly hoofs it up nicely he still comes off as a bit of an immature black Irish braggart by each film's end, while Frank has gone on to become a full adult, valuing Garrett for her strengths and not trying to relegate her to any pre-determined niche. Similarly in keeping his frailty and innocence he becomes more masculine, ala a hero in a Howard Hawks film.

So on this incredible first of August, I salute thee, Garrett and Sinatra!