Gogol Bordello: Non-Stop

Gogol Bordello: Non-Stop (2008)

Dir. Margarita Jimeno

As far as I’m concerned, Gogol Bordello is the most important band alive today. There is not another band out there as passionately committed to both roving experimentation and rock-solid pop thrills. I can remember the very first time I heard them. How many bands can you remember the moment they first entered your radar? Not many. I mean, I don’t remember the first Radiohead tune I heard, or the first Clash song. But I remember this. My old buddy Tommy (of Ghost City Searchlight) and I were driving along the highway --I think it was route 66 out of Virginia into Washington DC. He’s always playing new bands for me, and they’re usually good. But this one was different. This one stirred something in me that hadn’t been moved by a new band in a long time. Excitement. That lighting crackle of, “woah, what’s this?” That white-hot quiver of energy that starts in your gut and works its way up through your spine, hits you in the heart on the way, and floods across your brain like a foaming pint of beer on the dance floor of some neon-lit punk dive. Excitement. That unmistakable flicker I felt back when I heard punk rock for the very first time (also thanks to the good Mr. Coupar, now that I think about it). “Woah, what’s this?”

Gogol seems destined for the cinema; Songwriter/frontman Eugene Hutz actually got famous as an actor in EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED (he’s great, the rest of the movie is serviceable) long before most people knew he was a musician. Madonna, who clearly knows a good thing when she hears it, cast Hutz and featured Gogol in her breathtakingly idiotic directorial debut FILTH AND WISDOM (which is neither filthy nor wise). Hutz is great in that, too, largely because he wisely (maybe that’s what the title is referring to?) ignored the script and made up his own lines. And their theatrical, over-the-top performances speak for themselves in terms of their obvious cinematic potential.

How is it possible that this hasn't been made into the greatest movie in the world?

But film has not yet served Gogol Bordello as well as it should. EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED is decent, FILTH AND WISDOM is downright terrible. Hutz is barely in the NYC art punk doc KILL YOUR IDOLS (though he leaves an impression), and the less said about THE PIED PIPER OF HUTZOVIA, the better.* And unfortunately, we’re obligated to add GOGOL BORDELLO: NON STOP to that same list of films which somehow manage to completely strike out on capturing that Gogol magic on film. NON-STOP is a serviceable enough documentary with some enlightening moments for true Gogol fans, but unfortunately completely fails to capture the infectious energy and heady madness that defines the band.

It’s obviously a pretty low-budget affair; it looks mostly shot hand-held on video and the sound sometimes isn’t that great. That’s not a problem, though, as a scrappy cobbled-together aesthetic is essential to all great punk art. What is a problem is that the film is edited all wrong to build any kind of momentum. Too many mumbly over-the-shoulder long takes of unimportant encounters, too many slack sequences of people sitting around and not doing anything particularly revealing or entertaining, too many lengthy interviews with uncharismatic or unintelligible people who don’t have much to add.

Ultimately, the movie suffers from a lack of narrative focus. The director thinks that simply showing us footage of the band behind the scenes will be sufficient reason to create this document; unfortunately I can’t agree. Band docs are always something of a risky vanity project, but the best ones find a way to reflect their subject’s tone in a different medium, and find succinct things to communicate about the artists through what they choose to show us. This one simply doesn’t really manage that. Instead of reflecting Gogol’s anarchic electricity, it feels disjointed and meandering, talky without saying much and unfocused without being freewheeling. Basically, it’s a movie which seems to perpetually undermine the wild-eyed instincts of the manic seekers at its center, a film which is perpetually threatening to become a party which never actually happens.

A rare scene where you see Hutz having a little more fun, but unfortunately you can't understand anything he's saying because he's either a) incomprehensibly drunk b) speaking untranslated Ukranian c) badly recorded or d) some combination of all of the above.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s some fun and even insightful material here; Hutz discussing his early life as a penniless Ukrainian immigrant in America has something telling to communicate about what led the guy to his fixation on crafting a new and multicultural identity and family. But there’s nothing else in the film which elaborates on that theme, so it just becomes one of several isolated incidents which appear and dissipate just as quickly. Nothing sticks, because nothing seems to connect to anything else.

Most troubling of all, though, is that the film completely fails to capture Hutz’s natural ebullience and magnetism. He’s clearly a guy who has thought a lot about his art -and that’s a good thing- but from what we see here, he sure doesn’t look very fun. He seems self-conscious and guarded, a guy who doesn’t really like being watched at work. He seldom smiles or seems to be enjoying himself very much. Maybe that’s the point, this purported party animal is really sort of a sad, thoughtful guy, a quietly calculating artist who lets loose only in the thick of a show. But if that’s the case, we need to understand him a little better for that knowledge to mean something. NON-STOP just makes him seem distant, distracted. They have better luck with violinist Sergey Ryabtsev and drummer Eliot Ferguson, who seem to be enjoying themselves a little more (in fact, Ferguson’s sardonic acceptance of his role as “band mom” to these drunken maniacs provides the film’s funniest moments), but neither of these guys is in it enough to provide the film with structure it desperately needs.

Without this sort of structure, the film feels rudderless, episodic, and a little dull. It suffers from being just a document about a bunch of stuff which happened, rather than an examination which forms cohesive whole. When we get to the end, we’ve seen the band plenty, but unfortunately don’t really know them much better at all. It’s an assemblage of sporadically interesting visual anecdotes, nothing more; a lot of data, without any real communication. The music is still great, but a band this musically and visually arresting deserves a better story. Oh well, maybe Madonna will make another movie.  

*OK since you insist: it’s a documentary made by this psycho stalker ex-girlfriend/one-night-stand, who follows an increasingly uncomfortable Hutz on a directionless meander through dismal Eastern Europe. It may well be the single most passive-aggressive film I’ve ever seen, as the director clearly assumed that this trip would be a romantic one and becomes increasingly hostile as Hutz tries to distance himself from her. The accusatory tone of the narration and obvious discomfort Hutz shows with being followed by this nutjob easily overwhelm a few nice moments which seem to have been captured against the odds, although I can’t deny that the film has a certain horrifying charm as ultra-awkward anti-comedy.

This may just be the hardest mothafucker in the entire world.

Jubilee

Jubilee (1978)
Dir. Derek Jarman
Starring Jordan, Toyah Willcox, Adam Ant, Richard O’Brien, Nell Campbell

Here’s a funny little bit of 70s pop art, an early attempt at capturing the punk aesthetic on film before punk had even really crystallized into a genre of music. It probably doesn’t have as much to say about society and philosophy as it thinks it does, but on the other hand it’s probably saying a lot more about 70s England than it thinks it is, too. So, you know, give a little, get a little. And as far as pretentious self-consciously arty 70s anti-narratives go, it’s pretty entertaining. So given that Paul McCartney etc just wished the Queen a happy diamond jubilee, I figure it’s only fair to remind the world that Toyah Willcox, Adam Ant, Jordan, and the guy who played Riff Raff in ROCKY HORROR beat them to the punch by 30 year and a lot of nudity.

The framing device for this story finds queen Elizabeth I (Jenny Runacre, small parts in THE LADY VANISHES, THE PASSENGER, and THE WITCHES and also playing a dual role here) being brought forward in time to the late 70’s by her advisor, occultist John Dee (Richard “Riff Raff” O’Brien, who Adam Carolla once described as the most obnoxious guest he ever had on his show). The queen wanders around what appears to be a post-apocalyptic wasteland overrun by bored, violent, nihilistic punks and expresses some concern over the direction her country has taken. Her criticism has a certain amount of support, because, for example, the current queen has just been killed in a arbitrary street mugging. Not necessarily a sign of a stable, prosperous society in my book. Take it from a Political Science major.

Seriously, teachers. Leave those kids alone.

But maybe we’re better off, because it must be said that the queen is super boring, but the various punks, arsonists, anarchists, nihilists, musicians, and sexual deviants that overrun the film are mostly a colorful and amusing lot. Much has been made over the film’s inclusion of early punk staples like Adam Ant, The Slits, and Souxie and the Banshees, but mostly the film is populated by cult actors and early punk scene kids (for instance, Malcolm McLaren protege and Sex Pistols’ muse Jordan) so don’t expect a big parade of cameos. They’re playing exaggerated, absurdist versions of their already exaggerated, absurdist personas, so there’s a kind of mordantly funny parody of the apocalyptic concerns expressed by most of straight society at this new generation of deviants.  

On one hand, it’s kind of a pretentious art film, where people might say things like, “In those days, desires weren't allowed to become reality. So fantasy was substituted for them - films, books, pictures. They called it 'art'. But when your desires become reality, you don't need fantasy any longer, or art.” or maybe out of the blue we’ll watch a naked ballerina dance around a bonfire in the middle of a bombed-out wasteland in slow motion for the entire duration of a classical piece. Oh my, look, they’ve juxtaposed classic British high culture with profane modernity, however did they think to do that. But on the other hand, director Jarman isn’t entirely above indulging in the more pulpy aspects of his punky Mad Max London, so a reliable stream of orgies and murders keeps things nicely visceral.

The movie is clearly a reaction to 1970s British malaise, as the economy crumbled, the Empire waned, and British cultural identity suddenly came into question. Jarman cleverly shoots the whole thing on location, using the bombed-out WWII era husks which are still around to remind us that this is an England which is caught between a past that it can’t let go of and a future which it can’t seem to build towards. So even though I think Jarman is over-reliant on trying to shock you with his nihilist characters, their reactionary lifestyle does feels truthful on some level -- emotionally, anyway. It’s not such a far cry from listening to the Sex Pistols articulate their own frustrations with the decaying ruins of classist English society in the excellent Julian Temple doc THE FILTH AND THE FURY. You can see that these kids were not just lashing out pointlessly: they were making an (admittedly crude) calculated political statement about the pathetic future that their society was offering them. The deliberately modeled themselves as a chaotic inverse to repressed, regressive postwar British culture. ‘You expect us to just shut up and accept a pathetic half-life of stuffy mannerisms and fading empire? Well fuck you, we quit. We’re not playing your game. We’re making up our own rules.”

Condescending Jordan is condescending.

As with most movements which are purely reactionary, I’m not sure their philosophy holds up quite as well out of context. I mean, I’m for mayhem, pretty theft, nudity, androgyny, unprotected casual sex, pyromania, and punk rock as much as the next fellow (and actually, probably a lot more, now that I think about it). But these days, I’d say idealism is more revolutionary than nihilism. Perhaps because we needed the prickly rejectionism of the early punk movement to break us out of the 70’s doldrums before we could move into ironic postmodernism, and finally, some kind of new perspective which is possibly just peeking into the public consciousness today.

But even if not, it’s at least intermittently fun to watch these freakos do their thing. In particular, Toyah Willcox and Jack “The Incredible Orlando” Birkett are mesmerizing as a sociopath pyromaniac and insane record label executive, respectively. Birkett is apparently primarily a dancer and mime, and completely blind to boot (I guess that explains his Borgnine-level crazy eyes) but he’s playing an already outrageous character with both the crazy and the charisma turned up to 11. He’s a side character in this one, but ends up feeling like the central hub around which the movie rotates -- and although their criticism of media conglomeration and corporate opulence is somewhat passe now, you gotta remember that it’s pretty impressive (and still trenchant) in a movie from fuckin 1978. It also sounds the death knell to punk maybe 3 years after it came into existence. It would be amoral corporate interests like Birkett’s “Ginz” character (and of course, Jordan’s own boss Malcolm McLaren) that would ultimately reduce punk to a safe, predictable, mass-marketable hollow shell. Those equally reactionary right-wing types who used to spit on John Lydon everywhere he went? They didn’t win. But the money did. The money always does. 

The seductive face of evil.

Anyway, an interesting little time capsule which falls somewhere between HOLY MOUNTAIN and REPO MAN. In a few years, the punk aesthetic would becomes commercialized and conglomerated and be sold off globally in little chunks until it was meaningless. By the early 80s, it became shorthand for a hostile, dispensable “other” that folks like Charles Bronson could blow away in an effort to restore a decent society. But here, for an occasionally irritating but memorable 103 minutes, it’s nice to have a reminder of how it is we got there in the first place. If Queen Elizabeth I really did travel through time to the present, I’m sure she’d have some major issues with what she saw. But I think she might like the movie. Like its protagonists, it can be longwinded, vacant, and ugly. But there’s an essential germ of genuine truth and bruised humanity in there, and as a snapshot of a turbulent and dismal time for Old England, I think it’s just about right.

God Save the Queen.

We mean it, Maaan.

Album review: World/Inferno Friendship Society - "The Anarchy and the Ecstasy"

World/Inferno Friendship Society

“The Anarchy and the Ecstasy” (2011)

There’s an old and seldom used adage which goes, “It’s hard out there for a dapper anarcho-punk carnival barker costumed weirdo.”  We’ve all noticed this at some point in our lives but I’m betting no one knows it better than Jack Terricloth, front man and songwriter of the World/Inferno Friendship Society, a loose punk cabaret orchestra carnival sideshow collective which has been steadily making music for a small but gradually expanding audience since 1996. Things have looked better for old Jack, even though the band is making some headway opening shows for the likes of the Bouncing Souls. Since their last album --2007’s Peter-Lorre-centered masterpiece “Addicted to Bad Ideas”—they’ve lost three key members, including guitarist Lucky Strano (whose distinct high-tone guitar warble is badly missed) and drummer Brian Viglione (probably WIFS’s biggest name, due to his other job as the drummer for the Dresden Dolls). The difficulty in sustaining a group of 10 or more musicians (let alone making any money at all!) seems to have taken its toll on the band and on Jack himself, and making a new album with a fraction of the members of the previous album didn’t inspire a ton of confidence (neither does the cheap-looking cover art and album design).

       
        But what do you know, it turns out old Jack still has some fight left in him, or at least enough to make “The Anarchy and The Ecstasy” a worthwhile endeavor. Yes, the band’s mammoth sound is somewhat reduced here, and the production sounds a bit stifled and muddy compared to the wild dynamics of their last two. Rather than accepting this handicap, though, Jack and company have gone and changed up their game, creating a surprisingly warm and accessible album which may be their most consistent – though not their best – yet.

    
       The album begins pleasantly enough with the mid-tempo cabaret stomp “I Am Sick of People Who Are Sick of My Shit.” It’s hard not to speculate that this is a jab at his former cohorts who abandoned ship, but the song’s ingratiatingly clever wit prevents it from starting the album on a sour note. As usual, it’s a flawlessly constructed attack of horns, pianos, guitars, multiple vocals, and punk percussion, but it’s hard not to notice that it lacks both the manic energy and the overwhelming force of their best work. There’s no way to recapture the huge sound of their former, larger incarnation with a mere 6-9 players, and as result their attempts to recreate that operatic musical drama on tunes like “Canonize Philip K. Dick OK” and “They Talk of Nora’s Badness” sound regrettably anemic by comparison. Perhaps realizing this, “Anarchy” finds Jack in a more personable, confessional, and thoughtful mood than any previous album, and the songs suit the current line-up much better.

       In fact, ditching some of the more outrageous musical adventurism reveals an appealing pop sensibility which up til now remained hidden beneath the theatrics. Were it not for some lightly jazzy touches towards the end, “Thirteen Years without Peter King” might well be a Billy Joel tune, with its hooky piano and melancholy pop chorus. “The Politics of Passing Out” would not be at all out of place on a 70’s Bruce Springsteen album, complete with spritely saxophones and a by-the-books rock structure. The acoustic “The Mighty Raritan” finds Jack unexpectedly waxing nostalgic about his (or someone’s) childhood to a disarmingly sweet tinkling piano. It’s a surprisingly earnest moment for a guy who usually hides behind cheeky quips and obscure references.

        That’s all well and good, and the songwriting is as strong as ever. The problem is that earnestness doesn’t suit World/Inferno as well as anarchy does. Jack’s voice is an exaggerated theatrical wail, and it works much better shouting suitably dogmatic anarchist edicts (“You don't change the world by sitting in your office / Sitting in your office is changing you!” he sings on “Canonize Philip K. Dick OK” – though the Koch brothers probably differ with him on that sentiment) than it does with the more confessional lyrics to “Raritan” (where i was nurtured and perverted / by women free-thinking / and hoarse voices in love”). They’re good lyrics, but do you really want Jello Biafra telling you how he’s feeling? World/Inferno may just be too ridiculous to quite gel with heart-on-your-sleeve sentiment. Outrageousness and strident idealism play to their strengths; emotional excursions neuter them a bit and diminishes the things which make them most unique.  And of course, it’s hard not to miss the manic frenzy of their best tunes, like “Brother of the Mayer of Bridgewater” off “Red Eyed-Soul” or the wild swing avalanche of  “Ich erinnere mich an die Weimarer Republik” from “Addicted to Bad Ideas.” “Disarming Smile” has a pleasing gallop to it, but it’s only an average tune and everything else seems oddly chaste – nothing really drags, but for a group of outsider punk anarchists they don’t seem to cut loose with quite the vigor they once did. The closest they get to sounding like the best version of themselves comes near the end, with the heady drama of “The Apple Was Eve” which finally manages to regain the heft and the wild abandon of their previous work.   

            Still, the album is by no means a failure. It feels like an odd sidestep for them, but you gotta give some credit for bravely exploring some new terrain (though for the record I can’t imagine what the fuck Terricloth is talking about when he goes on about this album having strong bluegrass touches. The closest thing to bluegrass on here is the vaguely honky-tonk shuffle of “Lean Times for Heroes” and even then only the verse really plays it up). Whatever you may think of his hard-line idealism, it’s hard not to be a little inspired by Terricloth and Company's commitment to their lifestyle and their unique sound, and their consummate musicianship and songwriting skills are undisputable. It’s nice to know that however lean the times may be for our heroes, they haven’t lost the faith. But here’s hoping that something pisses em off a little before they write the next chapter in the saga.  

Special Note: World/Inferno are playing the Rock and Roll Hotel on H street in Washington DC Sunday, June 26^th and you’d have to be a damn fool to not go to this one. They’re one of the wildest live acts out there today. See ya there.