Saturday, August 29, 2015
It was on a hissy 11th-generation cassette in 1991 that I first heard the music of Daniel Johnston, about whom little was then known in the musicophile circles in which I ran. Though Johnston had been recording his unique music for a decade by that point, information about him apparently hadn’t reached college kids in New England. We knew him simply as “The Crazy Guy,” and gleaned only a tantalizing legend about the origins of his music. He supposedly worked in a Burger King and would slip home-recorded tapes of his music into the fast-food bags of pretty girls. Or so the story went.
Tags: film , movie , documentary , what i'm watching , daniel johnston , the devil and daniel johnston , home movies , music , mental illness , Image , Web Only
Friday, August 28, 2015
Call it "graphic poetry." Two former Vermont laureates have teamed up — again — on a new project that combines poetry and cartoons.
Outgoing Vermont Poet Laureate Sydney Lea, who cofounded the New England Review in 1977 and has taught poetry at various colleges and universities here and abroad, partnered with former Vermont cartoonist laureate and longtime Seven Days cartoonist James Kochalka on a six-panel project simply called "LEAF." It's published in Rumpus, but you also can read it below in its entirety.
This isn't the two artists' first collaboration. In 2013, the Vermont Arts Council and the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction sponsored a slim, 12-page graphic poem Lea and Kochalka worked on together called Vermont Double Laureate Team-Up.
Kochalka, who was laureate from 2011 to 2014 (Edward Koren picked up the torch last year), says he drew the panels first, then gave them to Lea to add the poetry. He provided him no theme or other guidance. The two "mushroom guys" in "LEAF" are the same as the ones featured in Kochalka's 2014 graphic novel Fungus: The Unbearable Rot of Being, an outgrowth of the "Fungus" strip that ran previously in Seven Days.
Tags: james kochalka , james kochalka superstar , glorkian warrior , sydney lea , creston lea , vermont poet laureate , vermont cartoonist laureate , edward koren , Image , Web Only
This ultra-cheap Blumhouse production has something of a pedigree; it won the Audience Award at last spring's SXSW. Director-cowriter-star Patrick Brice also snagged a Grand Jury Prize nomination at Sundance 2015 for his drama The Overnight — another movie we missed in local theaters.
Finally, Creep stars Mark Duplass, whom my colleague Ethan de Seife recently described as "an irritating actor (and worse director) whom I simply cannot abide." While my own feelings on Duplass are considerably more moderate, I found myself wondering if Creep had been designed specifically for those of Ethan's persuasion. Because Duplass plays the "creep" in question here.
Tags: movie , film , creep , patrick brice , mark duplass , horror , found footage , Movies you missed , Image , Video , Web Only
Tuesday, August 25, 2015
Rutherford was chosen from four finalists, a number that had been winnowed from the dozen proposals submitted to the CAC last spring. The three other finalists were Mary Hill, Anthill Collective and Mary Lacy, the last of whom is currently painting a mural on another pair of silos at the Burlington headquarters of Dealer.com.
CAC member Justin Marsh, one of the so-called "Silo Sisters" who've been working on this project, says, "The concepts that [Rutherford] had given us tied into the heritage of Vermont and the history of the sawmill being there. These were things we thought people would connect with."
Tags: silo , mural , art , jeffersonville , cambridge , cambridge arts council , silos , sarah c. rutherford , public art , Image , Web Only
Monday, August 24, 2015
The Pushcart Prize anthologies collect the "best of the small presses" in a given year. Many writers are nominated, because any small journal or press can submit its own authors for the prize, but few are chosen. Last year's winners included such heavy hitters as Russell Banks, Rebecca Solnit and former poet laureate of Vermont Ellen Bryant Voigt.
Tags: books , reading , author , daniel lusk , pushcart prize , gennarose nethercott , honeybee press , ben aleshire , poems for strangers , wind ridge books , Image , Web Only
A longtime poet, writer and educator, DeNiord, 62, says he was first asked to become Vermont's next poet laureate a few weeks ago in a phone call from Alex Aldrich, executive director of the Vermont Arts Council. An official letter from Gov. Peter Shumlin arrived August 10.
“I was stunned and humbled by this. I didn’t expect it at all,” says deNiord, a Westminster West resident who currently teaches English and creative writing at Providence College in Providence, R.I. DeNiord will replace Syndey Lea, who was appointed Vermont poet laureate in 2011 and retires this year.
DeNiord, a native of New Haven, Conn., grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. The son of a doctor, he initially expected he'd become a physician himself, but instead earned a bachelor's degree in religious studies from Lynchburg College, and later, a master's of divinity from Yale Divinity School and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. For five years, deNiord worked as a mental health therapist in New Haven, Conn. before pursuing his current teaching and writing career.
Tags: Vermont Poet Laureate , poetry , Chard deNiord , Image , Web Only
I’m as addicted to popular music as I am to movies, so, besides the various movie channels that my family had in our cable package, I’d often turn to MTV. This was in the mid- to late 1980s — the glory days of the channel's “alternative music” show “120 Minutes.” The show aired on Sunday nights from midnight to 2 a.m., just when good students should have been getting the sleep they needed to focus on their schoolwork. Doing well in high school was important to me, but exposure to new music was equally vital.
I’ve always found the term “alternative music” (or “alternative rock”) to be a uniquely unuseful moniker; and I’ve never really felt that that amorphous genre played much of a role in defining my musical tastes. But I guess I’ve been lying to myself, because many of the bands that remain essential to my musical life are strongly identified with late-‘80s / early-‘90s “alternative” music: the Jesus and Mary Chain, Julian Cope, Robyn Hitchcock, Camper Van Beethoven (especially Camper Van Beethoven), Public Image Ltd., the Buck Pets, R.E.M.
I still listen to the music of all of these bands. As Daniel Levitin (among others) have shown, the music that we listen to when we’re teenagers is always especially special to us, in large part because it gets enmeshed in the processes by which we become adults and defines our personalities to ourselves. That may be why I still like these bands. It may also be because they, along with many of the other groups showcased on “120 Minutes,” made excellent music.
Tags: what i'm watching , video , music video , mtv , dinosaur jr , the cure , just like heaven , alternative music , alternative rock , Image , Video , Web Only
Saturday, August 15, 2015
Produced by second-generation exploitation film producer Lou Arkoff, this series has the stated goal of remaking a bunch of 1950s B-movies for modern audiences. They got some pretty big directors to helm these things: Robert Rodriguez, John Milius, William Friedkin.
Tags: movie , film , what i'm watching , runaway daughters , joe dante , actors , character actor , genre , b-movie , exploitation movie , 1950s , Image , Video , Web Only
Friday, August 14, 2015
Back in 2013, a Vice article called "The Brown Mountain State" introduced the world to Vermont's heroin problem. The much-read piece was authored by two Vermonters then living in NYC: Gina Tron and Hannah Palmer Egan.
The latter is now Seven Days' food writer; the former also returned to Vermont and writes for the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus as Gina Conn. Her memoir authored under her pen name, You're Fine., was published last fall by Brooklyn's Papercut Press and written up in Interview magazine.
Tags: book , author , you're fine , gina tron , gina conn , vice , Image , Web Only
Monday, August 10, 2015
Those radio waves must have had a strong impact, as Mulvaney-Stanak has made a career in sound. As DJ Llu, she’s been spinning tunes for more than 15 years at nightspots all over Burlington. She hosts a weekly show on the University of Vermont’s radio station, WRUV (and used to host Seven Days’ podcast “Tour Date with DJ Llu”). And she’s the development and outreach coordinator for VCAM, Burlington’s community media-making organization, where she’s involved with audio and video projects of all kinds. But, she says, “My first love is, first and foremost, radio.”
Already a fixture on Soundcloud, Mulvaney-Stanak and a small group of like-minded radio enthusiasts have used that website to share a short audio piece that seems like it could be a transmission from the future of radio. Team WBTV-LP (see below for that acronym’s significance) — which consists of Mulvaney-Stanak, Rob Henkel and Tiffany Lee — has created a radio piece titled “Tattoo a Unicorn on Your Forehead” as their entry into an online radio competition called the Radio Race. You can hear their entry below.
Tags: radio , radio race , WBTV , WBTV-LP , KCRW , Llu Mulvaney-Stanak , sound , audio , community , Image , Web Only