In the Wilderness: Rodney DeCroo interview on Night Moves, Street Photography, and Al Purdy's Advice

Images of Rodney DeCroo in what follows are by me. All other images are by Rodney DeCroo

Rodney DeCroo's book of street photography, Night Moves, is even more impressive than I'd realized it would be when I sat down with him to talk about it at the Continental on Commercial Drive last year for a piece for Montecristo. It, uh, didn't hurt to see the images from it projected at enormous size on the screen of the VIFF Centre, at the book launch last month -- which, it turns out, is a great way to look at photographs; I'd love to see other such shows, showcasing the work of local photographers, hint-hint. But I felt a bit unprepared for how powerful the work was, seen that way, in part because I'd previously only seen many of these images as JPEGs on my computer, during the writing of the article, or on social media. It was another thing to see them filling a theatre screen -- it brought out detail and power and a cinematic, even film-noirish quality (as a fellow patron observed).

I'd previously wondered, at times, if DeCroo -- who, since his last album (2017!), has taken on theatre and film as well as photography, and even joked about doing standup as part of his (surprisingly funny) introduction at the book launch last month -- was diversifying too much, risking the dilution of the force of his work, but Night Moves is up there with Didn't Hurt as one of DeCroo's greatest non-musical / non-poetic accomplishments. 

The Q&A with Mike Usinger was also entertaining, and Rodney did a couple of great songs I'd never heard before. The high points of his short set were "Pennsylvania Skies," which I was lucky enough to get on video, and a song that I think was called "Go Tell Huey Lewis," a funny, sharp-edged, rocking bite at the shitty pop culture of the 1980s (which had alienated me as much as it did Rodney; my favourite thing about Lewis remains his allowing himself to be filmed pissing in that Altman movie. I never cared for his music).  

Not all of the photographs below are from Night Moves -- but I've tried to show my favourites of the ones that did not make the Montecristo article (we had requested a few that weren't in the book, and indeed ran a couple that were shot on Granville Street, as are a couple of the ones below). If you're interested, I would hasten to buy a copy of Night Moves while it is in print, which even I am going to be doing shortly, for the second time, since I gave my first one to Efrim Menuck the other night; there were some similar themes between the Godspeed piece I did, about sampling a street preacher, and Rodney's photography, which, as befits the norms of street photography, is done without asking permission of its subjects. The book had even come up during my conversation with Menuck, which touched on the ethics of doing East Hastings field recordings, and he was glad to receive it.

What follows are outtakes from the Continental conversation; the Montecristo piece was based almost entirely on the first half of my conversation (where I sat down and turned on the recorder and just let Rodney run), whereas what is below is from the second half, where I asked questions...

By the way, another article has been written about the book (and not by me!) for Stir Magazine, with different images.

Allan: Just to be clear -- you don't only photograph in this neighbourhood [Commercial Drive].

Rodney: No, no. I go downtown. But the heart of the book is this neighbourhood. But the book goes all over the east side, so there are photos from, like, the PNE, there's photos from Chinatown. I mean, just a handful. There's photos from Mt. Pleasant, there's photos from Hastings Sunrise.  Roughly the east side.  

Allan: Do you go back to Pittsburgh to take photos of places from your past?

Rodney: No, but I'm wanting to. I'm going to apply for a grant to do some photography and writing. I might even live there for a few months. 

Allan: Okay. I was going to ask -- your poetry is often very interior and inward-looking and connected to your past...

Rodney: Mm-hm.

Allan: Whereas your photography is a way of looking out into the world. 

Rodney: Yeah. It was a relief, too, a real relief to start looking outside of myself. But, like, my lyrics and my poems are always very imagistic. They have a strong visual component to them. People always say to me, "Wow, that poem" or "that lyric... I can see it." What they don't realize is, I don't actually describe much. I just do a little bit, so people can see it themselves, right? I'm not as descriptive as people think I am. I just give people enough, hopefully. I learned that reading Hemingway, when I was a young guy, or Raymond Carver -- he's very similar: he gives you just enough so you can create the image in your head. Because if you give people too many details, you rob them of the opportunity to create what they're seeing, what they're reading. We're most engaged when reading a poem or a story if we can create, so we're seeing it ourselves as we're reading it. 

Allan: Yeah. A song like "Jacob's Well,"  to me, I have a very clear image of where that's set, but someone else might have a completely different image in their mind.

Rodney: Hopefully! If the poem or the song is doing its job, they should, right? I mean, that's what I love. When anybody listens to one of my songs, seriously listens -- not just as background -- or sits down and reads one of my poems, in that moment, they're kind of co-authoring the piece. They're bringing their whole history, their personal feelings and memories to the piece. It means specific things to them that might have nothing to do with what I intended, and it means specific things to them that it wouldn't mean to anyone else. That's one of the things I love about writing songs and poems and plays, is giving people the opportunity to kind of come into that space. If the work's being engaged with, then there's all these versions of it out there in people...

Allan: But with photography, it's almost the opposite! You're giving them the image.

Rodney: I'm giving them the image. There it is, and do what it as you will. 

Allan: Right. So... you talked [in a section that ran in the Montecristo piece] about the guy getting cat food and lunch meat, about capturing the people of this neighbourhood...

Rodney: I'm very interested in people. And I'm very interested in people that... I have a poem called "Ordinary Things," which will be in the book. And it basically talks about me as a kid, starting a fire in a field, y'know? And I just had paper, matches, dried grass. But then the whole field catches fire, and the fire department comes and they're fighting the fire, and there's all the people watching; nobody knows I did it. And they're there, fighting it, and I say, "I conjured dragons with mere paper, matches, and dried grass, and after that, there were no ordinary things." 

And that's how I feel about the people I photograph. There's more to everyone; I don't know how to explain it. I'm just captivated by people: "Look at that guy's face over there!" I will wait for a person like that and try to take his photo...  [Note: the image below is not the image Rodney is showing me as he says this -- he may even be talking about someone walking by outside the window -- but it's the face I think of when he talks about the guy going to Super Valu for cat food]. I don't know if I'm making sense...

Allan: You are. 

Rodney: So I see my work as having a very clear mission statement. I'm interested in people, people who, when you walk down the street, you probably don't see them. But I don't want that to sound bad, because these are real faces in my book, real people, and I don't want it to sound like I'm talking down about them, that I'm photographing "losers." 

Allan: I said this last time we talked, but I also like that all the people you photograph are people who have some fight in them, who have some life in them. I've never seen you take photographs of people who look beaten down. I mean, maybe you have, but I haven't seen them; in what I've seen, there's zero element of "poverty porn" [a term that also arose in my conversation with Efrim].

Rodney: Oh... well, I have taken some of those photos. But I've learned not to use them, because that's not my goal. I mean, I'm drawn to people on the street, but I try to be careful. Even if somebody looks like they're living rough, if they have some life to them... I mean, I have a shot of two guys downtown, and they've pulled their wheelchairs kitty-corner to each other, and the one guy is putting a needle in the other guy's hand. I think it's a powerful photo, but I don't use it, because I'm worried that people would see it as exploitative. I try to be careful. I have photos of guys smoking crack and stuff like that, but...  It's not my goal to say, "look at this asshole," or "look at the suffering."

Allan: What else is in your "not to be shared" file?

Rodney:  It's called "not to be shared" for a reason, Al! It's mostly... I mean, I have some really good photos that I won't share, because I feel like they're depicting people in extremes, people suffering, people in pain. Some of those photos are pretty powerful, but... I feel... like...

Allan: Right. 

Rodney: And don't get me wrong, I do have some photos that will be in the book of people who are down and out, who are struggling. There's this weird balancing act that's going on, right now, especially in street photography, where everybody is, like, everything you shoot is exploitative, because you're not asking permission. The worst of it is from 20-somethings. They're always, like, "I didn't say you could take my photo! Did you get my consent?" But consent isn't an issue. Consent is, like, if I wanted to kiss you. Taking your photo on the street, I don't need your consent! This is a right of expression, artistic expression. We do have rights to privacy, but they have to balance those rights. Rights to privacy are respected by my not being allowed to take a shot of you in your home -- in your apartment or in your house. But if you're on the street, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy, and I can take your photo, and I don't need your permission. 

Allan: And publishing it in a book, you don't need it, either.

Rodney: No, because it's artistic expression. If I took your image and I sold it to Coca-Cola, and they were using it for billboard ads to advertise their product, then I would need your consent -- I'd need you to sign a release waiver and they'd need to pay you something. But this isn't that. This is artistic expression. But that said, people are very sensitive these days to how people are portrayed, to race, to gender. And a lot of people are like, "If you're not getting permission from people, you're doing something really wrong." Or, like, taking people with needles in their arm, passed out on Hastings Street is really exploitative, is "poverty porn"...

Allan: Right.

Rodney: And one thing I would like to say, that's not what the term "poverty porn" was originally meant to be. We have all these phrases we throw around and we don't actually know what they fuckin' mean. "Poverty porn" was a phrase that was used to address organizations like UNICEF, when they would show commercials of, like, emaciated babies -- "please donate." So the goal was to take graphic images of suffering to produce a guilt reaction in you so you would give some money. I mean, I'm not saying that you can't draw a parallel between taking and photos and stuff, but... here's the other thing I want to ask, and I haven't answered this for myself. I think, to some degree, street photography is always going to be a bit exploitative. It's the very nature of the act, right, and I guess you better do a good job then. Because because you're making art of people, and you haven't asked them. It should be done with respect and it should be done with grace and compassion... 

...But I want to ask this. I was taking a photo of a guy, he had a transparent plastic bag over his head, a plastic covering over his head and he was smoking crack; it was all dark, it was night, so all you saw was this lit-up plastic thing, you can barely see the guy's profile and the light as he drags off the pipe. It was a powerful image, but my friend was like, "You can't use that. That's a guy smoking crack on the street. That's exploitative. Would you want to be portrayed that way?" But the thing is, these things are all over our streets. Is that part of it, that we don't want to see it because we're just too nice? We don't want to think about it? We don't want to be confronted with it? We don't want to have to look at it? That's why we have it all in certain areas of the city, maybe. And part of me wonders, if' it's out there, why can't I take a photo of it?

Allan: On the way to meet you, today, I was thinking, "What would Rodney take a photo of?" And on the Skytrain, there was a whole area of a crowded Skytrain with no one sitting in it, because there was a guy that had set up a bed for himself on three or four seats and he was sleeping on the Skytrain. It was his "bedroom." I actually walked over to see what he was doing. He didn't smell bad or anything; people were just staying back to respect his privacy, and maybe because they were afraid of him, because he wasn't following the rules...

Rodney: I would probably take a photo of that. There's a lot going on there, right? I think I would take that photo. Now, if he looked really beat up, if he was clearly in a lot of pain, I might take shots where I concealed his face. Or I might not. It's always in the moment. I go with my feelings: "Oh, I'm not going to take that. He's got enough eyes on him, he doesn't need mine, or the eyes that are going to be looking at the photograph." And other times, it's like, "No, I'm taking that photograph." But I never want to be cruel. 

Like, I have a photograph of a kid I took at Playland when I was with Lucy, a kid in a shirt that said "Party Animal," and he was eating a hotdog, cramming it into his mouth. And he was really overweight. There was a lot of character, but I thought, "Nah." I'd feel like I was poking fun at him, like the point of the photo was to say, "Look at this guy," like I was a 16-year-old making fun of him. I'm not saying he feels badly about himself; he might be just fine crammin' hotdogs down with his fuckin' Party Animal shirt with, like, the Tasmanian Devil on it. It's kinda classic. But I felt like I would have been laughing at him... Like, Diane Arbus' photos sometimes feels mean. And that's not my goal. 

Allan: Bev Davies has said that she won't take a photo -- or won't publish a photo -- where people are going to get in trouble. where the image could be used against them. Like, I think she was around for a riot on Hastings on the punk scene. Or, like, the hockey riots...

Rodney: That would be my impulse too. Though I'll never say, "No." There might be a moment where someone is doing something really heinous and really hurting somebody. I'll take that photo. And if somebody wants to make something out of that... Like, if it's just a bunch of kids kinda smashing a window, for all the reasons I smashed things when I was growing up, I'm not going to take a photo of that, because I don't want those kids to get arrested, but if I had a photo of two guys who had somebody up against a wall and were beating the shit out of them, I'd take that photo, right? And I'd publish it -- if it was a good photo. 

That's the other thing: Is it a good photo? Like, I have shots of some pretty interesting moments, but they're not well-composed, they're not pleasing to look at. So I don't use them.

Allan: Following on the idea of composition -- is it entirely instinctive? 

Rodney: Yeah. I have purposefully never read about composition. I'm not interested,  just like I avoided creative writing school. Most of the poets I know have degrees in creative writing. That's the industry, that's the way it works. I've purposefully avoided that. I remember Al Purdy told me when I was living just off of 1st... there used to be a McDonald's there; it's a fitness centre now. The irony there that's never lost upon me: they went from giving heart attacks to preventing heart attacks. And there's a little row of apartment buildings -- I lived down there. And that was 1996, I think? I had just finished a book of Al's poetry -- it was Naked With Summer in Your Mouth. I love Purdy, I love Al, but I'm 57; I respond to his poems differently now than when I was a young guy... Anyhow, I knew he lived part of the year in Ameliasberg, Ontario, so I called him up. [For what follows, Rodney does a great imitation of Purdy's gruff, distinctive voice].

"Hello?"

"Is this Al Purdy?"

"Who else would it be?" 

"Hi, Al, my name's Rodney, I'm a poet in Vancouver..."

"Of course you are. Who else would fuckin' be calling me -- fuckin' poets!"

And I said, "I just finished reading your book, and I loved it." 

"Thank you." 

And I said, "I wrote a poem called 'An Open Letter to Al Purdy.' Can I read it to you?"

"Well, I guess. Go ahead. I can't stop you." 

So he listened. It was a long poem, too, and it wasn't a very good one. And it was about, 'What am I doing' -- how I was about 30 at that point, and writing poems was all I seemed to want to do. My wife left me, I don't have any money -- I've got 88 cents in the bank, I don't have a career, my friends are all moving to the suburbs, getting married and having kids, and... what the fuck is wrong with me? And Al listened, and he laughed in all the right places, and I finished, and he said, "That was one hell of a poem, Rodney." And I knew it wasn't, but I was very chuffed he said that to me. And he said that you have to do what you have to do, and to make your peace with it. If it makes you any money, or if you win a few awards... He'd won a few awards, and he said it was nice in the moment, but afterwards, you don't even feel it. He said the only thing that mattered to him was writing the next poem. He said, "I would really recommend you try to really take that in. You're a poet, for better or worse, that's what you are." 

And we talked a bit more, and I said to him, "Should I go to creative writing school?"

He said, "Rod, I can tell by talking to you, you were not meant for creative writing school. That would be a tragedy if you went to creative writing school, because they're going to try to make you like all the rest of them, and you're not like all the rest of them. You need to go and find your own path, just like I did." And I said, "But wait a second..." Because I had read this other book that was a compilation of young poets from the University of Victoria creative writing program, which was a highly celebrated creative writing program at the time in Canada, because, like, Patrick Lane taught there and Lorna Crozier, and everybody was like, "Oh, Patrick!" "Oh, Lorna!" -- it was like a fucking cult, all worshipping, and all these people flocking to this program; and they had a book, Breathing Fire or something like that. But Purdy had written one of the intros, and he talked about how good all these poets are, and I called him on it, I said, "What are you talking about? You fuckin' wrote this..." And he said, "Well, Rod, sometimes you gotta do things for your friends..." 

So yeah... what was my point with all that?

Allan: We were talking about not going to school...

Rodney: Right. So here's the thing: I joined a photography group online for awhile, and people gave feedback on photos, and it seemed to be a lot of older guys who were retired who had bought fancy cameras and were taking photos, and they were really into the laws of composition, really into it; they were composing the life out of shit, right? And I'm trying to trust my instincts, my intuition, because that's where the art lies, and it seems like intuitively, I have a sense of composition already, so why am I going to try to, like, learn a bunch of Do's and Don'ts? I need my own Do's and Don'ts. Nobody else's.

And I know I can kind of shoot from the hip and sound like I'm being a little belligerent, but here's the thing: I think if you genuinely feel in your body, in your soul, in your heart, that you're supposed to pursue some sort of artistic path, I don't think you should ever do anything in relation to becoming that or doing that because somebody says you "supposed" to. You should only do things that you're really led to do, that you feel in your bones: you feel the excitement, you feel the pull. Then you go there and find out who you are as an artist. 

I'm not saying don't study other artists, fucking study the shit out of the artists you love. And when I say "study," I don't mean, "I'm going to deconstruct it and break it down." Have a relationship with it. Be aware of it, and ask yourself, "Wow, why am I so drawn to this?" And just absorb it by osmosis. And then... I really believe that we've institutionalized organic processes that used to exist for artists. Like, a kid who wanted to be an actor would, like, hang around a theatre troupe, and they'd bring him on and let him be an apprentice and, y'know, clean their gear, and then one day, they'd be like, "Hey, you want to try this little scene?" And you'd learn that way. But now we have theatre school for that. And writers who would be in the wilderness,  on their own, trying to figure out, "How do I write a poem," and then might meet a poet, and that poet kind of becomes a mentor... but you have to be in the wilderness. People are so afraid of the wilderness! You've got to be in the wilderness, man! 

Allan: Speaking as someone who makes a living within the education system, part of it is that there's a whole bunch of people who want to make a living teaching people to do stuff. We insert ourselves between them wanting to do it and their actually doing it, and pretend that first you have to read this book, take this class, learn this principle. No. You have to learn by doing it. If you're going to be any good at something, no matter what class you take, what book you read, no matter what you learn, you have to learn by doing it. And if you haven't done it, it doesn't really matter what you've read about it.

Rodney: Well, the thing I tell people is that all the stuff the experts are there to teach you, that's stuff that was extrapolated from the work that other people were doing instinctively. They boiled it down to "this is how you do it." They deconstructed it and created a set of instructions. And for some people that's great. That will work for them. But I believe you're cheating yourself. Just be yourself. Go where you need to go. Other than the work itself, that's the joy of it, right? Anyhow... 

Allan: Amen. But let me ask about one of the more obviously "perfectly composed" photos, the kid eating the ice cream. I would imagine that someone who was operating from a rulebook of Do's and Don'ts would be impressed by it!

Rodney: That's a certain type of photo, and I'm very proud of that photo, but that photo happened in the moment, y'know? I saw the kid, I saw him emerging from the shadows, I saw the angry face and the ice cream, and I just clicked it. And I edited it a bit. In the photo, the Mom was just ahead of him; there was a bit of her in it, so I cut her out so I could focus on the kid. And I love how he's just stepping out of the darkness and some of the shadow is following him.

And with street photography, you don't have time. You can say, "I see how the light is here and I see how the shadow is there, I could capture somebody emerging from the shadow, and I could hang out there." Or I'll see some cool background and wait there for an hour and take photos of people going by, hoping that the magic happens. But you don't have much control over street photography, which is why I love it. Like, when I write a poem, I always tell people -- because I've done the odd mentoring of young poets, and they always go, "How do you write a poem?" And I'm like, "I really don't know!" The only thing I'm an expert in is writing Rodney DeCroo poems. The problem is, I only know enough to get the poem done. I don't know half the time what's going on. Like, a friend of mine is a professor and he teaches creative writing, and he was teaching a Canadian poetry course, and he used one of my books. It was during COVID, so the students were watching videos, so he asked me if I wanted to see his lectures. I thought, "Oh, I don't want to see that," but he's a smart guy and he loves poetry, so I got curious, and I started watching it. At first I was like, "I wasn't fuckin' thinking that!" And then I was like, "Oh shit, he's right! Holy fuck, that is going on there, that did happen to me, I was reading that poem at that time and kinda thinking about it..." It was akin to attending your own funeral, and hearing people talking about you, and wanting to say, "No, that's not what I meant," then stopping and going, "Oh, maybe they're right?!" 

That's how I feel about my poetry and my songwriting and even my solo shows. Like, people say to me, "You know in Didn't Hurt, where you come out of massage therapy and you really see the sky for the first time, and you call it 'first time blue,' and then the moment you meet Lucy, the little girl who helps you process more trauma, and you say, 'She had the bluest eyes I'd ever seen,' you obviously were connecting the sky and her eyes!" No, I wasn't! I wasn't aware of that! It takes people to point it out to me. But I trust the process, I trust my intuitions, I trust my impulses, and that's where the art happens! It's not about controlling it. 

And so with composition, on the street, you only have a split second, and it's an instinct: I see something and something in me goes, "That's worth taking a photo of." And then I take the photo. Sometimes it will be more obvious -- like the boy with the ice cream. But what I really saw with him, the thing that struck me the most, was the angry face as he was eating the ice cream. And I related to that! That was like me as a little kid. So I took the photo, and then I looked at and it was like, "Oh, there's so much more here." But there's a part of me inside that can work fast enough -- the intuitive side -- and you only develop that by being on the street and taking thousands and thousands of photos. I trust that. I'm really not thinking much when I'm taking photos. I'm reacting. 

Allan: So the ice cream kid -- you weren't lying in wait for that?

Rodney: No, I walked around the corner and he was there, with that face!

Allan: So how many shots did you shoot of that?

Rodney: I think I took three of him.  

Allan: And then you picked the one. And you cropped it.

Rodney: Yeah... I don't always crop. I used to crop all the time. I crop less now because my sense -- my sense -- of composition, whatever that is, is more developed now. So I don't crop, because I'm more interested in other elements that I would have thought chaotic, like an elbow sticking into the scene where you don't see the rest of the person. But now I realize that those things add energy and life, and I'm very interested in that. I don't like to talk in those terms, but I call it "disrupting the composition," right? I'm interested in photos where, "I want to push this as far as I can before it falls apart, because there's too much happening." If you look at the photos of Gary Winogrand, the New York street photographer, there's a lot happening in his shots. He barely edited at all. 

Rodney: But again, I don't really have strict rules. I'll say that to you and then I'll go home and take a photo on the way with a bunch of things happening in it and I'll go, "Eww, I'm going to crop the shit out of that!" It's whatever my instincts are in the moment. 

Allan: On the topic of permission, you do ask permission if you're taking photos of kids, right?

Rodney: Sometimes. I don't take a lot of photos of kids, but I didn't ask permission to take the photo of the kid eating ice cream. But I mean, why would anybody object to that photo, unless you've had your own bad experiences...? There's nothing wrong with that photo, I think it's a great photo that captures, for me, a childhood. Another photo I like is called "Spider Man" [Rodney asked me not to print titles for these -- we had a few working ones, for reference purposes, but his work is actually generally un-titled, and no titles are given in the book. But he's called this one "Spider Man" a couple of times now, including at the VIFF Centre event]. It's the young black boy, standing like this, very intensely, with a group of people, and his mother is standing there, smiling. He has a look that's almost fierce -- that kid's face is really intense, when you look at it, but there's this beautiful [quality to it]. And here's his Mom, and she's so much taller than anyone else. She's standing right behind him, beaming. And there's this woman with her umbrella and her shades... That's one of the photos I'm really proud of...

Thanks to Rodney DeCroo for the conversation. Order Night Moves here (it seems to be at some Book Warehouses, too!). 

Guest blogger ARGH!! says goodbye to Joe Don Baker

I never understood ARGH!!'s fascination with movie tough guys. Well, okay, Robert Mitchum, sure -- everyone likes Robert Mitchum -- and I'd understand if he got all misty for Lee Marvin or Charles Bronson, say... but Wallace Beery? Guy sounds like a right nasty piece of work. And ARGH!! is obviously nutso for Joe Don Baker, too (who died yesterday at age 89; I had thought he was long gone). He's constantly recommending these kinda-crap 70s action thrillers Joe Don starred in (okay, Framed and The Pack are pretty good) where Joe Don basically Buford Pussers his way through the film, smoking cigarettes and looking rumpled, pissed-off and slightly hung over, which is kind of how you imagine Joe Don Baker always looked.    

ARGH!! doodle of Joe Don Baker

So with Joe Don gone, I asked ARGH!! to explain himself and comment on favourite Joe Don movies. He writes with a lot of ellipses and lowercase... I have elected to just do it his way... he spills that one of his aliases is Nick Mitchum.... I assembled the following from his posts, but with his knowledge and blessing... find him on social media, he has entertaining posts... probably an art show coming up... Joe Don will be represented somewhere...

ARGH!! Obituary for Joe Don Baker

my fascination with movie tough guys?...i grew up a skinny uncoordinated geek...the jerry lewis of richmond...picked on and called homo by the macho jocks in high school...i loved humphrey bogart and robert mitchum movies and mickey spillane's mike hammer books...and i alway liked southern caricature cartoon characters...reddy in ruff n' reddy...deputy dawg...huckleberry hound...i lived out my revenge on the jocks fantasies in my joe mason cartoons...joe was partly based on a hybrid of yosemite sam and inspector clouseau and dean martin as matt helm...cows and living shits and other evil oppressors were the jocks...in the 70s i loved dirty harry and paul kersey in the movies...JDB was the meanest but also the most likable tough guy at the time...in my mind a combination of reddy and deputy dawg and mike hammer and fat elvis if he had faked his death to become a drive in movie star who worked with directors i liked...phil karlson and robert clouse...i wanted to be joe don baker...joe mason's meaner and tougher big brother...nick mitchum = nick tosches + nick nolte + robert mitchum + jdb as mitchell...

top 5 [Joe Don Baker movies]...framed...mitchell...the pack...golden needles...speedtrap...wacko....ok top 6...all 6 belong in my top 5 list...charley varrick and the outfit are fave costarring films...framed...mean and gritty and sweaty and ultra violent......the pack...real scary...jdb to the rescue...they’re not pets anymore sez it all…looks like it could've happened on galliano when i used to camp there...mitchell...a sleepy mean jim rockford and/or joe mannix...a key largo shoot out on a boat...remade as the guard with the irish jdb brendan gleeson...golden needles...a 1970s hong kong kung fu raiders of the lost maltese falcon...speedtrap...mitchell crashing cars and busting heroin dealers again...wacko...mitchell gone to seed pursuing the lawnmower killer in a high school on halloween...all the best of the 70s..oops...wacko is 1982...

i saw this at the lux...vancouver bc's skid row grindhouse theatre...new double bill every monday...wednesday...friday...$2...many weeks i saw all 6 movies in the 1960s and 70s and 80s...it was an hour bus ride into the city from the 'burbs...photo by Fred Herzog.

[Image by Fred Herzog, used without permission, but I'll remove it if anyone objects - AM]

i missed this one when it was released...took many years to track down a copy...for the time (1972) and the budget i think it is a real good movie...i wish i had seen it on the big screen...ahead of it's time for 1972...one of the first movies about vietnam vets coming home all fucked up by the war...

the first one is the best one...the only one with jdb...bruce glover...crispin's dad...played deputy grady coker in the first 3 movies...i read an interview where he talked about what a great guy jdb was...but he told the interviewer not to ask him about bo svenson...he didn't want to talk about him...hmmmm

i first saw framed heavily edited on network tv...then i saw it uncut at the lux...

i first saw mitchell at the local drive in...long since closed...demolished and now a townhouse complex...sob

saw this at the delta drive in and again at the clova...

first time at the lux...many years later a bootleg dvd and finally last year on blu ray and dvd...

The Shadow of Chikara...also known as Demon Mountain...The Ballad of Virgil Cane...Thunder Mountain...Wishbone Cutter...The Curse of Demon Mountain...

delta drive in...

first time at the hillcrest drive in in surrey...second time at the coronet on granville... [Posting a song from the soundtrack]:

the ballad of joe don baker...
he don't look back he's insane...
he knows gangsters and indians...
he's an american saint…

delta drive in...

when i was young i wanted to be be a letter carrier when i grew up...not an astronaut or a fireman or a rock star like all my friends wanted to be...i wanted to be a letter carrier like cody in the outfit... the most fun you can have at the drive-in... the king of the lux theatre on hastings... raise a glass to joe don.

GY!BE live notes and photos: Vancouver, May 10th

(Mildly updated to reflect having seen the second show)

There is not much I can say (articulately) about tonight's Godspeed You! Black Emperor concert at the Vogue, especially since I've got to take my meds and go to bed (because the cat is going to wake us up for food in about four hours) but I am very glad to be going again tomorrow (which is actually "later today" as I write this). The music was intense, beautiful, potent and inspiring, and the films were fascinating and at times confrontational (but never in a negative or exploitive way). On the floor, seated in front, I was poorly positioned to see them unless I stood, which I didn't really want to do -- it's like seeing a movie standing up -- so for much of the show, I simply sat with my eyes closed, letting the music wash over me, letting it transport me (until someone walked down the aisle and collided with my knees, which happened a few times; I guess I was hard to see). There are very few bands that produce music that I would describe as transcendent; Swans are another one. Even as you struggle (I struggle) to find words, to name the emotions, to understand what is happening, there is a feeling that by immersing yourself in it, you will be healed in some way, that the music is changing you, regardless of whether you assent. 

Tomorrow (later today), I'm going to stake out a balcony seat and sit right at the front. I may even stay sober (I was a bit altered tonight).

I did take a few photos of the night, but before I show those, one tangential thing I loved was that PM Press had a presence on the merch table; a representative drove up from the US with many, many books, on the invite of Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Since my wife works in marketing, I bought her a copy of Advertising Shits in Your Head, which reminded me, on a flip through, of The Medium is the Massage, that McLuhan/ Fiore book. There were books about anarchism, veganism, punk. I could see many of these books being of interest to the GY!BE audience.

I was very happy to see Jason Lamb's Nomeansno book on the merch table and got the PM Girl (whose name I offered to print, but she was fine just being the PM Girl) to pose with one. Later in the night, with the post-show merch lineup stretching around the stairs, the PM Girl gave Bev a copy of a Black Flag book that had Bev's photos in it (there was only one on hand, "but I can bring more," she offered. I don't know if she will -- I don't actually need the book, but was thinking more about my readers...).

 Hey, I know those photos!

After the show, I was hanging out for a bit, and decided to shoot a few more titles on display, thinking that the books that were on the tables could be an index of the values of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, if you wanted one. (Question for future Efrim interview, if one happens: is the band straight edge?).

There were also, of course, shirts and vinyl. I realized (see previous post) that I had never asked if the dog on the posters and shirts for this tour was perhaps a representation of Wanda, Efrim's dog, now gone. See the post below for more about that. I am shy about bugging Efrim about it again, though; he'll think I'm dog-obsessed. I bought the purple one: 

Gotta love those place names. Check out Edmonton.

At some point I became fascinated with the bank of film projectors that were being used to generate images, often with manipulations and distortions, some of which were achieved with the fingers of the projectionist moving about since a sort of bubble in front of the -- is it called a "lens" when the image is coming out of it? A projector lens? I'm going to go with that. I loved that it all appeared to be done via film strips, canisters, and vintage equipment (though I saw none of the "burning" of film strips that Brock Pytel mentioned to me, from his own experiences hanging out in a GY!BE projection booth, so maybe the burning/ melting film effects were somehow "filmed?" I'm not sure, but nothing looked digital). There was no booth, last night -- just multiple projectors and twinned and layered images. 

There had been film used at the one previous GY!BE show I saw at the Liquid Room in Tokyo, in 2000 or 2001, but it was much simpler stuff, as I recall -- alienated urban landscapes, similar to what you see at the end of Antonioni's L'Eclisse. There was some of that, but in faster edits, with more images, more effects, more complexity (I think).

It was harder to get images of the band -- even for Bev, who may not have gotten much that is usable. Conditions were simply not ideal. She had been told she only could shoot the first ten minutes, but then the security told her later that they'd been told twenty (maybe to buy lingering photographers a bit of forgiveness); alas, she had followed directions. I feel very little inclination to try to get up close tomorrow, however. I think the best way to see this band is by letting the images speak for them. I think that's what they want, too... 

I did (like Bev, I presume) get an image of the opener, a Montreal artist named Mat Ball, who played loud, distorted electric guitar with feedback -- Dave Bowes remarked -- coming from two amps (I'm not sure how he could tell!). Dave likened Ball's music to Paris, Texas on acid; I was more thinking of Neil Young's Dead Man via Keiji Haino. It was quite beautiful, filled with soul and expression; Ball's album was the only one on the merch table I didn't think I'd see again... so I bought it. It was striking how his sound filled the whole room. He played with no visual accompaniment. 

One may note that the records were actually more expensive on the merch table than they are in Vancouver stores... but I didn't let that stop me from buying a couple. And I grabbed an F-sharp CD for Bev...

When the lights came back up, after the break, they remained on for a good two minutes while a drone played, not performed by anyone onstage, that I could see. The audience was intensely lit during this time. I began to get the fears that they would carry out the drone, with no one onstage and nothing on screen, full the full ten minutes of allotted photography time. It was not so. 

Two musicians from the band finally took the stage, though, as flickering, shimmering images began to appear on the screen. I think it may have been Thierry and Sophie? Some of this must have been "Hope Drone," which involved the word "Hope" either scratched in film or written in chalk on a surface, flickering in a few different variants on the screen, but that first LP aside, I really don't pin titles to individual compositions. Someone does: a setlist is already online.  It's mostly recent material. Looks like I've got to buy that album where someone is being bled out, hanging upside down with your throat slit. Unless I already have it (or maybe it's only done live?). More on that here.

There weren't that many audio samples last night, but that one stood out.

But that song came later. I was talking about the slow intro. As lights began to flicker onscreen, other members trickled out, and the composition built.

Audiences were quieter in Japan, but better than the Richards on Richards show where everyone talked over Carla Bozulich, opening for Thee Silver Mt. Zion.

I could imagine less distractable people than I having a spiritual experience listening to the music being made last night. That's what I'm going to try for tomorrow.  The best ones I got were views from the balcony, when I popped upstairs on a bathroom run:

Update: the remainder of this piece was written on the second day, or tweaked to reflect a second-day perspective. I was able to see more of the films, though again, I closed my eyes for parts as well. I had missed the wildfire footage the day before. It was harrowing to watch. It was followed by images of ruins. Not sure which song it was, but it was very apocalyptic in tone.

I also got close enough to the stage on the second day to read Efrim's amp ("transphobes eat shit and die alone"). He's a strikingly beautiful man. I hope he doesn't find me too irritating. I am a trivial creature by comparison.

The main surprise was that they closed the set, on May 11th, with "East Hastings." I never expected they would play it. Maybe they hadn't planned to, either, until the article happened?

As for images, those are the only two I felt I needed to add. I still haven't seen what Bev got the first night, but I'll hold it in reserve, in case I get to talk to the band again. I was very glad she enjoyed herself immensely, the first night; when I proposed we get a bite, suggested Popeye's, so that's where we went.

I have nothing else to say about these shows -- I've written two giant pieces (see also here). Bev didn't come the second night, sadly -- but it's nice that she's spending time with her son. He's the kid on the Let's Wreck the Party cover, didja know? I could overhear her telling the merch guy, a friendly, helpful German, about it.

Happy Mother's Day, Bev! Glad you liked the band.

With all due respect to Nick Cave, if you don't have plans for a concert for Sunday, I'd advocate for Godspeed night two. Believe there are a few tickets left. Highly recommended, some of the most beautiful, powerful, ultimately healing music out there, where the main conflict for me is, "Do I watch this with my eyes open or listen with my eyes shut."

I'll probably do a bit of both tomorrow (later tonight), but this time I'll be doing it from a seat.