I’ve already declared my adoration for Concrete Blonde, and recommended you come see the show with me tonight (Thursday, June 24) at The Showbox – and now I get to present something super-awesome: I asked Johnette Napolitano a few questions via email about Bloodletting and this 20-years-later tour, and she responded with some great answers:

What was the inspiration to move from your previous punk rock vibe to a more gothic feel for Bloodletting?
Being other places in the world, and I'd never been anywhere but California, and Tennessee was the first place I lived other than LA, really. That was our third record and we'd toured a lot by then and I'd spent a lot of time - and I still do - in New Orleans and the South, and I love it down there and it's moody, for sure. Fucks with my hair something awful, but well worth it.

Do you think it’s awesome or hilarious that "Bloodletting (The Vampire Song)" became a Goth club standard in the 90s?
Awesome, hilarious, horrible, scary, weird, surreal, beautiful, a pain in the ass and very, very lucrative.

What was the catalyst for re-releasing this album and how does it feel to be touring with it again?
20 years seems to have gone by. A perfect storm, really. I lost my Dad and am still very much dealing with that, and he would have said, do it! He was very proud of the band. Never quite came out and told me so, but he didn't have to. I played for him the last time I saw him, he'd bought a guitar for himself. Only he and I would know what that gesture meant…I see a future for myself that I like, and I'm very lucky, we're very lucky, to still have an audience that would actually show up. That never ceases to amaze me. We'll have a great time and I'll come off and write and paint and work on opening a Flamenco place in New Orleans and we'll just play where we want to play, when we want. It's a good place to be.

Any chance we’ll see a new Concrete Blonde album emerge from this reunion (a girl can hope!)?
I'm hoping that we're not killing each other by week two. We won't though, everybody seems to be working in the same direction and after the last year basically a month of playing and sleeping on a bus while somebody else gets me there sounds good. I'm looking forward to it; I know we all are. I'll let the music take over and see where it goes.

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Photo Credit: Victoria Holt

Another favorite of mine at SIFF this year was the charming road trip movie Bass Ackwards. I grabbed some time with Director Linas Phillips and his co-star, co-writer and friend Davie-Blue to talk about the experience of making this film.

While Linas is a self-described brat and I was never sure what was true and what was said in fun, the interview was fantastic and I can’t wait to see what these two do next.

I thought Bass Ackwards was great, and the thing that really made it great (in my opinion) is that Linas’s character was so loveable that you want him to be okay. You’re really rooting for him to make it.

Linas: He doesn’t seem annoying? Because he’s not getting his shit together?

No. I feel like everybody’s been lost like that at some point…

L: Everyone’s been annoying? Annoying doesn’t exclude empathy, maybe.

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{Beautiful Darling screens at the Seattle International Film Festival at 6:15 at SIFF Cinema.}

"People who I interviewed said she was the most genuine person they had ever met" director James Rasin told me in an interview about Candy Darling, the transgendered actress who died in 1974 and is the subject of his engrossing documentary Beautiful Darling: The Life and Times of Candy Darling, Andy Warhol Superstar. He added he "I thought was weird because she's a person who is a complete construct, everything is intentionally, layer upon layer, an artifice but becomes someone so completely genuine."

That is one of the central themes and ironies that runs through Rasin's fascinating film, which played at the Seattle International Film Festival this year. Candy Darling was one of the Warhol superstars featured in the Lou Reed song "Walk on the Wild Side" (Reed's band, The Velvet Underground, also had a song about her called "Candy Says") where Reed sings in the second verse "Candy came from out on the Island, in the backroom she was everybody's darling; she never lost a head, even when she was giving head". While not exactly the most positive description one could hope for, Rasin's documentary is far more kind and thorough.

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"Basically, I told her I want to blow Samantha Jones into tiny little pieces" Keith Bearden, the writer and director of the often very funny new film Meet Monica Velour told me in an interview. By "her", he was, of course, referring to Kim Catrall, who plays Samantha Jones in the now much-maligned "Sex and the City" franchise and who plays the title character in his debut film that recently played at the Seattle International Film Festival.
 
Monica Velour is a has-been porn star, who may have been remembered for Saturday Night Beaver or Hooked on Hookers, although chances are, she's not remembered at all. She's living in a trailer park in Indiana somewhere and her life is a mess. Sadly, there are few skills that porn stars can take that will help them re-enter the job field and Monica wants to escape the live she has while regaining her former fame. It's like Sunset Boulevard, if, instead of Norma Desmond saying "I'm still big, it's the pictures that got small," she starred in a gangbang.

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One of my favorite films at SIFF this year was the beautiful, intuitive drama Cairo Time, written and directed by the equally beautiful and intuitive Ruba Nadda.

In person, Nadda exudes an open friendliness that instantly made me comfortable. We sat down for a few minutes and discussed everything from Patricia Clarkson’s eyebrows to the fiasco of Sex and the City 2. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that I was captivated by everything she said, and that I’d love to be able to sit down with her and do it again.

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{Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist, Rebel screens at the Seattle International Film Festival tonight, Wednesday, June 9 at 9:30pm at the Egyptian Theater.}

In the fascinating and thorough new documentary Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist, Rebel, you don't learn much about the larger-than-life, octogenarian character who spends most of his time in his pajamas and dates women who are at least half a century younger than he is. What you do learn about is a very smart and thoughtful man who has an unmistakable moral compass and has always ended up on the correct side of history.

The film was directed by Canadian filmmaker Brigitte Berman, who is best known for documentaries on jazz musicians Bix Beiderbecke and Artie Shaw. The latter (Artie Shaw: Time is All You Got) won the Academy Award in 1987 for Best Documentary and the former (Bix: "Ain't None of Them Play Like Him Yet") was responsible for Berman and Hefner meeting. When I interviewed Brigitte Berman after her documentary screened at the Seattle International Film Festival, she explained, "it just happened that Bix was Hef's favorite musician. When I won the Oscar for the Artie Shaw film, Hef tracked me down through Mary O'Connor, his right-hand woman, and she called me and said Hef wanted to get a copy of it, so I sent it down. He's been showing it and whenever I was in LA, I was invited to the mansion for movie night. Our friendship grew over music and movies." She further explained "I knew there was so much more behind him because I'd hear him talk after movies and I saw the intelligent and complex side. I decided that I wanted to make a film about him. I wrote up a treatment because I knew that he would never agree to it if someone came up to him and said 'Hef, can I do a movie about you?' The next day, he sent me a fax that said 'I love it and anything you need, I'll give you.'"

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If you've been to TIG any time over the past twenty days or so, you've noticed that the Seattle International Film Festival is one of our favorite events. Some 400+ short and feature films will have been screened by the time the whole thing wraps up on Sunday by giving out the Golden Space Needle Awards that morning and closing it out with a screening of the Bill Murray/Robert Duvall film Get Low and a party.

To get some more insight into the festival, we posed some questions via e-mail to SIFF's wonderful and extremely knowledgable Programming Director, Beth Barrett. Here's what she had to say.

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You could probably be forgiven if the first time you thought of Seattle as having a vibrant music scene was when MTV first aired "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Thanks to an engrossing new documentary from first time feature director Jennifer Maas called Wheedle's Groove that just played at the Seattle International Film Festival, you learn an awful lot about the thriving soul and funk scene from Seattle in the 1960s and '70s. While few of the artists are remembered today and fewer broke out of this particular scene, it was thriving because there were a lot of clubs booking these bands and they were playing several nights and week to large crowds.
 
The Wheedle's Groove project was first a compilation album from local buried treasure-finders Light in the Attic Records that they put out in 2004, featuring bands like Cold, Bold and Together, A Black On White Affair and Ron Buford. They aren't household names today, but the compilation has sparked a renaissance of interest in this time and it has spawned a supergroup of sorts from this era who play and record as Wheedle's Groove and released an album of new music in 2009 called Kearney Barton. When I interviewed director Maas at SIFF, she told me how the idea for this documentary came about. "I was doing a documentary, I was pretty new to making documentaries but I made a lot of short things, I decided I was going to find out how a music scene works behind the scenes. I started interviewing people like John Richards and Jason (Hughes) from Sonic Boom, different record labels. I was going to interview some of the Three Imaginary Girls, although I don't know that I did. I think I planned that interview but I don't think it ended up happening." It changed, she said, when "I ended up interviewing Matt Sullivan at Light in the Attic. They were just about to put out this compilation of soul music from the 60s and 70s in Seattle called Wheedle's Groove. I instantly decided that was the movie I needed to make instead of the one I had been making. There was a record release party (at Chop Suey) and I showed up there with a bunch of cameras and then here we are, five years later." It should be noted that she and Sullivan also married in that time.

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We asked Alex Robert, frontman for Black Whales, to keep us posted about what's going on with the band now that they are unsigned and recording a new album with John Goodmanson. We'll be posting his words here in three parts. This is the third. If you missed it, check out the first and second parts, here and here.

{If you would like to see the Black Whales at the Chop Suey, June 11th for free, email us your name and a reason why we should give you a pair of tickets to <tig@threeimaginarygirls.com> by Tuesday, June 8th at 5:00pm with "Black Whales" in the subject line. We have two pairs of tickets folks. Get 'em!}

So, if you've been following any of the little studio diaries that we have put up over the past four or five weeks, then a thanks is in order. Thank you very much! We really appreciate it. If you haven't, then nothing is in order. Nothing for you in this. Thank you for nothing.

To close things out: The next couple of weeks are John's time to do his thing to the thirteen songs that will be on this record. It's kind of a downer really, finishing a record. The next time I'll be in a studio to record music won't  be for awhile. And I've gotten so used to doing it everyday that everything else seems like plain Yoplait by comparison.

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{The Dry Land screens once more at SIFF, on Monday, May 31 - Memorial Day - at 1:30pm at the Harvard Exit.}

For well over a century and going soon into two, people have accepted the common phrase "war is hell" as a universal truth. While likely true, we don't often talk about what affect war has on people individually once a war is over. That is the central issue surrounding Ryan Piers Williams' thrilling, post-war character study The Dry Land, which just played at the Seattle International Film Festival this past weekend.
 
Ryan O'Nan stars as James, a soldier returning home to his small Texas town after serving in Iraq. The war changed him and he now suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Coming back home, he is unprepared to deal with daily issues and is constantly on edge. He certainly doesn't mean to be abusive towards his lovely and loving wife Sara (played by America Ferrera) or snap and his friends and coworkers who don't understand the psychological torment he's dealing with. At best, they can be sympathetic, but not empathetic. The director, Williams, said in a roundtable discussion with myself and a few other local film writers said about his film's protagonist, "he needed much more than people saying 'thank you for your service'. He needs people to actively try to understand his situation and offer him the support that he needs."

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