Craig Thompson is altering the parameters of what we expect from a graphic novel. From the snow-weighted landscapes of Wisconsin, as illustrated in Blankets (which established him as a vanguard in the format), to the fictional Middle Eastern land of Wanatolia, an Islamic desert kingdom in his latest opus, Habibi, Thompson erases the lines that have framed the borders of the comic book, pushing it into the realm of the traditional, epic-length book. At a hefty 592 pages, Blankets broke ground not only due to its size, but also its scope; here was a fully illustrated novel detailing Thompson’s complicated relationships with family, love and religion. There are no superheroes; it is not fantasy. It exists as something deeper: a literary autobiography—albeit a somewhat emo account.
In Habibi, Thompson moves away from personal experience to create a sprawling epic inspired by tales from 1,001 Nights, the Quran and Islamic history, complete with virtual lessons on Arabic language and lettering. The protagonists, Dodola and Zam, are a pair of outcasts—escaped child slaves who wander deserts, kingdoms and cities while their relationship zigzags across the lines of mother and child, sister and brother and, ultimately, lovers. As Thompson explores new realms in story, the author himself is reflected in the characters as they struggle with words, religion, sexuality and family; a quest perhaps to make sense of the confusing aspects of male and female relationships, the power of language, the purpose of art and the importance of environment.
Thompson is a powerful storyteller and a skilled artist. As such, it wouldn’t matter his chosen format, but having picked the graphic novel, which exhibits his gifts both with words and illustration, he is helping to transform the medium. ››
Gus Van Sant is the kind of filmmaker who makes wide-eyed film school kids salivate, given the fact he’s carved out an award-strewn career delivering star-driven features like Milk, Good Will Hunting, To Die For and Finding Forrester, as well as smaller, meditative indie passion projects like Gerry and Palme d’Or-winning Elephant. His newest is Restless, written by newcomer Jason Lew, in which two offbeat teens fall for each other while crashing funerals in their (and Van Sant’s) hometown of Portland as a means of escapism. Dennis Hopper’s doppelganger of a son, Henry, plays the lead, Enoch, while Mia Wasikowska, of Alice in Wonderland and The Kids Are Alright, plays his counterpart, the pixie-haired cutie Annabel. It’s a love story, as Van Sant himself describes it, but, like all of his pictures, it cuts much deeper than it appears, as one of the young lovers faces a life-altering secret, creating a familial bond that extends well beyond anything nuclear.
Van Sant accepted the project hot on the heels of the powerful, massively adored Milk, which earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Director and saw his screenwriter, Dustin Lance Black, and lead actor, Sean Penn, take home Oscars. While Van Sant remains a critically beloved auteur behind the lens, he’s also expanded his artistic pursuits to include everything from music to painting to writing novels. His fans may remain most thirsty for cinematic gems like the film that made his name in Hollywood, Drugstore Cowboy, or his early masterpiece, My Own Private Idaho, but Van Sant manages to find time for hobbies away from the director’s chair, too. Here, he talks to FILTER about his experience with the inexperienced, recording his own music and the dual importance of sound as well as its absence in the making of his films.
Without meaning to, one day I found Ron Swanson building a canoe. The stoic, salt-of-the-earth director of the Pawnee City Department of Parks and Recreation was disguised as a stubbled craftsman in a backwards baseball cap, untucked T-shirt and jeans. He was shaping a boat of Western Red Cedar with another finished vessel strung directly overhead while the Wilco album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot blasted from inside his orderly enclave. So well disguised he was in a persona so similar to his own, I at first mistook him for a mild-mannered Nick Offerman, he of the Offerman Woodshop in Glendale, California.
The boat was an exception to his normal work there, a passion project, he explained. He mostly builds Craftsman-style furniture, having discovered some years back that his carpentry skills were transferable.
“The best woodworkers are boat builders because there are no straight lines,” he said, showing off the canoe’s well-formed curves, taking short breaks to kindly continue conversation with this complete stranger who had randomly stumbled upon the scene while walking through the neighborhood.
And so, entranced by his workmanship, not for a good while did I recognize him, finally, like this: “Nick…are you on TV?”
There is a great misnomer about soul man Mayer Hawthorne, the Ann Arbor native who started life as Andrew Mayer Cohen, modern hip-hop DJ extraordinaire, all-around nice guy and concerned Michiganer. The story going around that “Mayer Hawthorne” started as a bit of a joke is untrue. The truth is that there has never been a dividing line between who Cohen is and what Hawthorne has become; there is no schizoid differentiation. “Hopefully not,” laughs Hawthorne from his home in Los Angeles. “There’s no character that I’m playing. My new album will go a long way in getting people to know who the real me is.”
The hip-hop producer known as “Haircut” who occasionally worked as a member of Athletic Mic League was simply looking for royalty-free music to sample when he began making his own tunes, writing songs with melodies and hooks that he sang to himself for quality control. He did not start out as a singer, and certainly not the sort whose level of silken soulful seduction can (and does) rival old-school giants Al Green, Smokey Robinson and Curtis Mayfield, to say nothing of neo-soulers like Maxwell. “There’re no church choirs in my background. No inclination to sing,” says Hawthorne. “Singing for me was nothing more than an in-the-shower exercise before this.”
“I think it was writers trying to have an angle. The movie had come out and people didn’t tuck their shirts in.” Speaking is Eric Bachmann. The movie he refers to is Richard Linklater’s 1991 breakthrough feature; the angle of which he speaks is that film’s title: Slacker. “We were hardly that,” Bachmann says of his band, Archers of Loaf. “We worked hard and we all had day jobs. We worked our asses off.”
With the exception of the two years he spent teaching English in Taiwan, the Archers of Loaf frontman has always been a working musician—first with the Chapel Hill, North Carolina, titans of indie rock, and then on his own as Crooked Fingers. “I was tired of being in a loud rock band,” Bachmann says of the Archers’ 1998 disbandment. “It wasn’t necessarily a personality thing; as far as band stories go, we were all in check. Aesthetically, I just didn’t want to be in a loud rock band anymore.” And Archers of Loaf—recently reunited by the same solid sound that drove them apart—are nothing if not a loud rock band.
Last spring, Long Island-based band Twin Sister packed in their normal lives and became full-time musicians. As bassist/guitarist Gabel D’Amico recounts, there was no love lost to their day jobs. “I was finishing up school. I was writing big papers and stuff. [Guitarist] Eric [Cardona] and [vocalist] Andrea [Estella] were working at Edible Arrangements,” he laughs. “Those were pretty horrific jobs. [Drummer] Bryan [Ujueta] is famous for having a lot of funny, odd jobs for barely anytime at all. He worked at a cowboy hat store; he worked at a puzzle factory.”
It was a long time coming for the band, filled out to a quintet by keyboardist Udbhav Gupta. Having met in their teens while navigating the New York music scene in separate projects, it was love at first sight. “Teenagers are figuring themselves out and finding out what they’re all about,” explains D’Amico. “The people that are now my partners are the people that, when I was younger, I looked at and said, ‘Those are the people I have to be with!’ They must have felt the same way.”
As the work became more diligent, the tunes solidified. With 2008’s Vampires with Dreaming Kids and 2010’s Color Your Life EPs under their belt, the friends took what seemed like an obvious leap of faith: They rented a house in the Hamptons to write their debut full-length. “I think it was burned into all our brains, growing up reading about bands,” admits D’Amico. “We were like, ‘Oh, we have to try that!’”
Shortly before the release of Annie Clark's third solo album, The illustrious, (in)comprabable Gregg LaGambina gave us "Sister of Mercy: A Short, Curious Tale of St. Vincent," the entirety of which you may find and read in Ye Olde Goode FILTER 45 (on stands now). Below, we are proud to present "A Few More Thoughts from St. Vincent: Curiosities and Leftovers from a Magazine Article." Without further ado...
On Tom Waits and performing his music at Rain Dogs Revisited…
I just bought this book that I haven’t read. It’s called Tom Waits on Tom Waits. It’s all of his collected interviews. I was thinking I would read it for some method-acting research, but I didn’t end up actually reading any of it. It’s a funny thing. When I first got asked to do [the tribute shows], Rain Dogs is the album I’m most familiar with and love. A funny thing happens when you really like something and it’s really great. When I hear it in its fully realized form, I think it’s magic and I can’t imagine all of the components that it would take to make it or learn it. I get very daunted by, like, “Oh, I don’t know what these changes are. What are these chords? I’ll never figure it out.” I kind of go through that same rigmarole every time [I cover a song]. But then I sat down to listen to it and really learn it, and was like, “Oh my goodness. These are pretty straightforward, constructed songs.” So the first part was a mystery, then it was a process of demystifying it, then the third part is this other plane of appreciation where I was like, “These words are so rich and these characters are so alive.” The second I started to open my mouth and sing the words, it went straight back to being totally mystifying. The prostitutes, the bookies, the carnies, and the midgets. They’re all so alive. They kind of just jump out of your mouth. I think everybody who did the project was approaching the stuff with the same kind of humility, wonder, and mystery.
On Eric Rohmer’s 1972 film Chloe in the Afternoon and its inspiration for her song of the same title…
I thought it was the sexiest title I’d ever heard. I just took the title and then thought, “OK, I’m going to build my own narrative based on this title.” I saw [Rohmer’s] Paris trilogy about a year ago. No disrespect, but it’s not as sexy a movie as you’d think it is by the [DVD] cover. It’s a morality film. How sexy is morality?
On whether or not the face screaming through latex on the cover of Strange Mercy is her face…
Oh, I’ll never say. But I will say that the person on the album cover did actually have to be totally asphyxiated to get the shot.
On the inspiration for the cover art of Strange Mercy that may or may not be of her being asphyxiated by latex…
I don’t know, really. I was working with this photographer Tina Turrell and we share a similar dark sense of humor. She shot the cover and she shot some of the disturbing press photos [laughs]. I just thought it was funny. There’s only so many ways you can play with your image. I’m a really big fan of [photographer] Roe Etheridge. I love his photos because there’s something… It looks like it would be a nice, normal photo but then there’s something that makes it slightly askew and just a little bit disturbing. Almost in the John Currin way, except that he’s a painter. “That’s a beautiful… ewwww.” [Laughs] I just like that sort of thing. I don’t know why. Part of it was also an homage to Can’s [1978 album] Out of Reach. If you know that album cover.
On why the sparkling alcoholic beverage champagne is mentioned prominently in two different songs on Strange Mercy…
I think I talk about them in completely different ways. One song, “Champagne,” means quite literally, being drunk. And then in the other song, “Year of the Tiger,” I remember sitting down with a friend who was really into astrology—and I mean the Chinese zodiac—all that stuff. She told me, “Oh, the year 2010, February starts the year of the tiger. It will be really difficult and really turbulent.” Lo and behold, it was. Probably the worst year of my life. So I thought of this phrase “champagne year”—Next year’s gonna be a better year, a champagne year. Then, I wrote the song.
On whether or not “Cheerleader,” with the lyric, “I see America with no clothes on,” is her first overtly political song…
Overtly political? No. I mean, I’m only overtly political in so much that I think all government anywhere is corrupt. I really don’t discriminate [laughs]. The song is only overtly political in so much as we have a really strange system here as every government everywhere has a strange system. I actually don’t really know how to answer that except to say that all government everywhere is always corrupt at some level and to some degree.
On why she decided to record the album in Dallas, Texas…
One of the reasons I am standing before you today is because of [producer] John Congleton. He has a wonderful studio in Dallas. When it came down to it, the way we worked, which was pretty much non-stop for almost two months, it just made the most sense to be in his great studio and his domain. No distractions. No social life. Just me and John in the studio, for the most part. I really honestly could not say enough good things about him as a producer, as an engineer, as a mixer, and as a person. If there was a parade… There should be a John Congleton parade [laughs]. I love him very dearly.
On the meaning of the phrase “strange mercy”…
The song “Strange Mercy” was the first song that I wrote for the album. I had it that long and I was kicking around that line, “I’ll tell you good news that I don’t believe/If it would help you sleep…” I think a lot of the time we find ourselves a in those moral conundrums, where we go, “OK, my goal is to cause less suffering than more.” I looked at all of the songs through that prism. Some mammals, when they give birth to a litter of kittens, for example, the mother can sniff out which kitten is too weak to really make it. And sometimes will kill or eat their young. You look at it in the context of nature; there are plenty of analogues to human beings. Because we are nature, we’re not… different [laughs]. We’re not different from the natural world, we are the natural world. To think otherwise is crazy. But, this idea of sometimes having to be cruel to be kind is a tough one. And I don’t have the answer!
Despite the waves of heat beating down on the pavement outside, a cup of black coffee sits on the table before Pat Grossi. A solid choice in most coffee shops, it’s still a surprising one for a summer day in South Pasadena, California. But that’s just Grossi, really, and the music he composes as Active Child is just as full of the unexpected.
From top to bottom, the café pulses with vibrant colors, lunchtime conversations and the occasional passing Gold Line train as Grossi discusses his initial experience with musical expression. Although this time spent as a part of the Philadelphia Boys Choir undoubtedly made a lasting impression, he did not discover that music might hold more for him until 2008. During a period when he found himself between jobs, he also found the opportunity to create music rather than just playing it. Focusing on guitar and vocals, Grossi wrote a lot rather quickly and his efforts were well-received as well as heartily encouraged by those around him. But when he came across Bon Iver’s storied and stately For Emma, Forever Ago just after recording some stripped-down songs, he reconsidered the minimalist approach.
“I can remember hearing it and thinking, ‘This guy nailed it.’ I’d never been so envious of anything in my life,” says Grossi of Justin Vernon’s album. “That was a big change for me, where I was like, ‘I need to move on because I can never, ever touch that.’”
Guillermo del Toro may be the closest thing our generation has to an Alfred Hitchcock. Like that master’s canon (about which Del Toro has literally written a book), Del Toro’s films are eerie, suspenseful, chilling, otherworldly and terrifying—but also funny, intelligent, inspired, female-character empowered, surprising and fantastical. The Mexican maestro has written and directed films like Pan’s Labyrinth, the Hellboy franchise, Mimic and Cronos, written others (including the forthcoming Hobbit films), owns a film production company and even entered the business as a special effects make-up designer. His latest project as a writer and producer is Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, an instant classic of the haunted-house and killer-creature genre starring Katie Holmes, Guy Pearce and Bailee Madison.
FROM GUILLERMO DEL TORO:
I’ve literally spent decades of my life reading, watching, writing and shooting only horror. I live in a house that is organized in seven libraries; it has thousands of books and about a third of them are horror. I’ve watched every horror movie made at least until the 1990s. I try to systematize: When I watch a movie, I watch it once for enjoyment and then if I like it, I watch it two or three times to study.
On my personal list, the scariest movies of all-time are—in no particular order—The Haunting, The Innocents, The Shining, Alien, Jaws, the original Japanese version of The Ring, The Uninvited and Night of the Living Dead. There must be more, but those are the ones that come to mind right now. They’re all absolutely classics. The moment in The Ring when the ghost crosses the TV screen and enters that living room… I was on an airplane watching that movie and I almost opened the fucking door and jumped out.
I don’t do that many scary movies; I do strange movies. There are moments in the movies, like the bottle scene in Pan’s Labyrinth, that have affected a lot of people, which is great. But I haven’t done that many horror movies. I’m very happy with Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark because what I wanted was to go contrary. Most of the time in horror movies, the female characters are just silly, screaming characters. I have devoted many of my efforts into creating female characters that are more interesting than the male characters.
I feel very strongly about presenting Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark—I only present movies that I fully support and really have enough influence or enough support to guarantee that credit. Don’t Be Afraid is something I wrote for myself years ago and I produced very closely. It’s always a director’s medium, so I would not call it “my movie” in that sense. But it certainly is a movie I am a big part of and I’m very proud of it.
Here are my secrets to making a terrifying horror film.
The rule of summer blockbusters has always been: If you can’t laugh about blowing something up, you might as well leave the dynamite at home. Action-comedies are the no-brainer cure for those dog-day August blues—beat the heat by watching Eddie Murphy and Bruce Willis drop comedy dimes just as easily as they drop hordes of enemy ranks. And now, in the grand tradition of ’80s classics like Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, Point Break and Beverly Hills Cop, we have 30 Minutes or Less, a buddy “ax-com” directed by Zombieland’s Ruben Fleischer about two hapless extortionists (Nick Swardson and Danny McBride) who force a pizza delivery guy and his friend (Jesse Eisenberg and Aziz Ansari) to rob a bank by strapping a bomb to the pizza boy’s chest. It’s like Dog Day Afternoon meets Mystic Pizza (actually, it’s nothing like that…but just imagine!).
The wish-list comedy cast is anchored by Swardson, the stand-up comic and veteran of countless Adam Sandler comedies and Comedy Central staples Reno 911! and Nick Swardson’s Pretend Time. And Fleischer, directing his second feature film after myriad music videos (M.I.A., Dizzee Rascal), commercials, “Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis” and creating and developing two Rob Dyrdek reality shows for MTV, continues to breathe new life into the sometimes-stale worlds of zombie and car-chase popcorn flicks.
Here, Swardson and Fleischer present their own Guide to Making an Ass-Kicking, Rib-Tickling Action-Comedy film. Yippie ki-yay!
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