All proceeds from the evening’s show will go to help Partners In Health‘s mission in Haiti.

Watch a compilation of some of Dr. Steve Brule’s funniest moments!

A sort of psychedelic cross between TV Party, Liquid Sky, and Junior Christian Science Bible Lesson, minus any concept of structure, The Three Geniuses was a live public-access TV show started in the mid-90s by Dan Kapelovitz, John Schere, and Mr. X. A mash-up of contextually ironic stock footage, trippy camera effects, and spiraling space vortices aplenty, the vital ingredient—what made Geniuses its own special breed of spontaneous insanity—was the footage the crew filmed themselves.

The lucky few present at Silent Movie Theatre night got to experience it reproduced in person, in (sur)real time. You could envision a Gary Wilson concert, on 2C-I, held at the schizophrenic homeless man’s funhouse under the freeway, and be part-way to imagining the atmosphere.

The Geniuses and their friends—from ex-Germs drummer Don Bolles, who did much of the sound design and set decoration on the original show, to regular guest stars like Karen Centerfold and Francine Dancer, public-access stars in their own right—posed, postured, and provided live accompaniment and personal flair to the projections on screen.

Kim Fowley, mad musical genius and subterranean L.A.’s favorite dirty old man, played MC, giving a modicum of method to the madness in the form of Q&A, T&A (bringing whichever young ladies struck his fancy up to the stage for indulgently crass interviews), and a hauntingly good freestyle song drummed up over the bass part to Van Morrison’s “Gloria” (kinda).

This naked lunch of “alternative Hollywood Babylon” (to borrow a phrase from Fowley) may not have been well-received or readily understood by much of contemporary society, but even the furthest from this subculture couldn’t deny the laudable brazenness and unadulterated energy put into the spectacle.—Not to mention the costumes! Perhaps that’s why Fowley asked at the beginning of the show, “Is anyone here from the L.A. Weekly? … Good.”

—Regina Cherene

*Although visually, David Cross with a beard might be able to pull it off.

—Nolan Knight

Strange World of Coffin Joe–Series Trailer from Hadrian Belove on Vimeo.

We have two tickets to see tonight’s Coffin Joe series screening at the Silent Movie Theater… for whoever writes us with an answer to this question:

What Brazilian town was “Coffin Joe” creator Jose Marica Marins born in?

Email the answer with the subject COFFIN JOE to fortherecord [at] larecord.com. Read Carol Ramos’ exclusive mind-wrecking interview with Marins here and do not miss tonight’s screening of the first two Coffin Joe classics—At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul and This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse! They are absolutely vital documents of the human capacity for insane genius without funding or societal support. Os Mutantes sang songs about him and L.A. RECORD dedicates immeasurable goodwill to him! (He also sent these ultra-rare prints to Cinefamily in a big burlap sack.) The contest closes at 3 pm today!

10/9 @ 8pm / SERIES: the strange world of coffin joe
At Midnight I Will Take Your Soul
shown with
This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse
In a feat of pure will and cinematic street smarts, first-time director Marins took a few scraps of film, a 600 square-foot studio and a miniscule budget pieced together by selling his family’s house and car, and created this dazzling garage Guignol masterpiece that rocked Brazil’s pop culture and psyche with its extreme violence, taboo-smashing scenes, and the creation of an indelible fully-realized character that would go on to capture the imaginations of horror fans around the world — Coffin Joe! God-defying and child-loving, philosophizing and self-aggrandizing, sadistic and ballistic, prone to proclamations and exaggerations (usually delivered via maniacally melodramatic monologues in Marins’ unique acting style), Coffin Joe debuts here as a fearsome undertaker who terrorizes the citizens with his violent, narcissistic behavior. Just for kicks he ties up a woman and lets spiders crawl over her, and, even more horrifyingly, he voraciously eats meat on Good Friday! One of the great debuts in horror in history.
Dir. José Mojica Marins, 1964, 35mm, 84 min.

After the overwhelming success of At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul, Marins pulled out all the stops for his second picture, making the Coffin Joe movie that was perhaps his masterpiece — and, oddly enough, a romance of sorts. Focusing on Coffin Joe’s “love life,” the plot is about his attempt to find a single superior woman to be his ideal mate, one that will help him in his quest to continue his bloodline by creating the “perfect” spawn, using his own perverse selection process—a kind of cross between “The Bachelor” and “Fear Factor”. In almost every way, Marins ups the ante from the first film, but without losing At Midnight’s punk filmmaking pleasures (the scratched-on-film title sequence alone is shatteringly cool). You likes the tarantula crawling up a girl’s nightie? Here’s an army of tarantulas! Here’s a roomful of cuties for them to crawl all over! You like the nightmarish ending of the first movie? Here, in a hallucinatory and bravura dream sequence, Coffin Joe is dragged into an incredibly realized carnivelesque hell, with undulating flesh carpets and Cocteau-like body parts sticking out of icy cavernous walls, all exploding onto the screen in full bleeding color! Viva la Coffin Joe!
Dir. José Mojica Marins, 1967, 35mm, 108 min.

Watch the trailer for “At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul”!

Visit the Everything Is Terrible! YouTube channel here!

Stewards of the rare and miraculously bad in movies—as well as TV, how-to, instructional and homemade video—the merry footage fetishists of Everything is Terrible! make live what snootier critics would just as soon let die. The fossickings of Ghoul Skool, Commodore Gilgamesh and Future Schlock through mountains of cassettes in search of flash-frozen schlock of their childhoods have won a following from likeminded connoisseurs of crud. Compiled on one DVD for your delectation is Everything is Terrible: The Movie, highlighting the dubious gems of their search. The weekend after EIT’s ‘Found Footage Freakout’ at the Silent Movie late last month found these sore-eyed custodians of the Temple of Dumb waxing philosophic over their hilarious group obsession. This interview by Ron Garmon.

If, as Theodore Sturgeon said, 90% of everything is crap, then why the curious charm of the rare that is Everything is Terrible? Just how rare is garbage anyway?
Ghoul Skool: First of all, I don’t know much about this Sturgeon dude but I think what he meant to say is that 99.9% of everything is crap. I guess since VHS has been declared ‘dead’ thousands must be thrown out every day. But I don’t think that means anyone but other found footage collectors would consider any of this ‘rare.’ I think that’s the biggest difference between VHS hunting and crate digging for vinyl—no one will ever say to me ‘You’ve got Yo-Yo Man on VHS?! What number do you want me to write on this check?!’
Commodore Gilgamesh: 90% is a very low estimate. There is absolutely nothing rare about the Terrible. It is a constant. The same charm is present in a birthday home video on VHS as in a Hollywood blockbuster on Bluetooth—it is all a mistake.
Future Schlock: It’s not that rare considering we are constantly surprised by new finds. Most people just don’t want to waste the time to find it.
Judging from your blog, the house definition of ‘terrible’ sounds like ‘a dubious idea ludicrously done.’ Any other boundaries or criteria?
GS: At this point, ‘terrible’ to us has turned into ‘amazing’ and we sincerely mean that 100% un-ironically. When going through a stack of VHS, hours can go by before anything looks worthy—then all of a sudden you hit the jackpot and you’ve got a bunch of awkward kids running around with donuts for hats singing about how Jesus died for your sins. Anyone who would rather watch ‘Band of Outsiders’ over something like that is no friend of mine.
CG: That is a far too specific definition of ‘terrible.’ I’d define ‘terrible’ as everything.
FS: Nothing that is intentionally terrible.
How does the EIT approach differ from the 1980s obsession with ‘le bad cinema’? Back in that day, people like Joe Bob Briggs and the Medved Bros. heavily patronized what they thought didn’t measure up to standards of taste prevalent during the Reagan Age.
GS: I haven’t seen that stuff personally, but now that I think of it, how many American movies from the Reagan Age still hold up in a ‘timeless’ sense? Seven? A dozen at the most? That whole decade must have wasted more energy, time and money on worthless junk than any generation combined. That’s also the era we grew up in, and we are so thankful for that.
CG: Not only are we critiquing our culture for not measuring up, but we are also making a comedy out of a tragedy. I think finding and making videos that are funny is the most important thing. Our beliefs hide in our cuts, not our words. But usually the footage makes the point itself.
FS: I think our scope is a little wider in what we search out like instructional tapes, etc., as we are not just limited to B-movies. Also a lot of bad movies are made by people that know they are bad so there’s no point in mocking something that was never taken seriously anyway.
What was it about the year 1986 that made for especially loony vid?
GS: Maybe that was the year that marks the height of our civilization, or perhaps it just reflects our excess in the ‘80s. All I know is if I were given a time machine, I would first go see how the pyramids were built. Then I would go straight to 1986 and apply for a job at a video store in middle America.
CG: ‘84, ‘87, ‘92, ‘97, ‘99, ‘01, and ‘08 were all pretty nice too.
FS: Bad ideas transcend every time period and each video looks like it should’ve been released 5 years before it was. But for 1986 specifically, I would say the blame lays squarely on the shoulders of the Chicago Bears’ ‘Super Bowl Shuffle.’
Tell us about favorite bits of dada you’ve unearthed. Sherry & Mark’s wedding video sounds like a trip to the moon on wings of sludge.
GS: Tapes like that come once, maybe twice in a lifetime. So many people who see that video comment saying ‘Is this fake?’ Which is amazing to me considering if I could have created such beauty myself I would probably give up on life, knowing I could never reach such beauty ever again.
CG: So many wonderful little turds. Lately, I’ve been pretty into watching a mustachioed man silently stroke his conduit bender.
FS: The Dogville Comedy Shorts carry a special place in my heart because I discovered them by chance very early in my crap-collecting career. These shorts about talking dogs suspended by fishing wire like marionettes were very popular in the ‘30s which reflects people’s never-ending love of bad ideas and comedic animal abuse.
You guys are champion hunter-gatherers of eyesore. Describe how this kind of ephemera is tracked down by experts.
GS: Why thank you! I’m not even really sure how we get it all, but over time we just attract it like moths to a flame.
CG: The key for me is to never watch anything that I may like. After a few years, perspective becomes so skewed that it is all great and horrible.
FS: A list of thrift stores and a lot of patience. If the description of the video sounds interesting, there’s about a 25% chance it is. Then you take the stack of tapes and you watch and wait.
Is the charm of working with vintage equipment equal to the buzz to be had in the hunt?
GS: Analog is so fragile and yet so warm that it almost feels like a living thing. There is something so comfortable working with VCRs but that’s really as far as it goes—the rest is all thinking machines and super computers.
CG: They cannot be compared. The high I get from digging through a moldy stack of VHS is like 1,000 orgasms. I’ve been watching videos on a VCR almost all my life. That is nothing.
FS: It’s not the same level of feeling because when searching for a tape, you can imagine all the possibilities that can come from a batshit insane idea. When actually editing, you can only work with what you are given.
L.A.’s own Fred Olen Ray is almost the Orson Welles of 1980s cheese. What do you think of his filmography? Any other unsung local auteurs we should know about?
GS: Fred Olen Ray and Jim Wynorski are masters and I highly recommend checking out their work. They have hundreds of films to their credit, and just last week we gave them EIT Lifetime Achievement Awards at our first live show. L.A. in general is sort of a wasteland for what we do, and it gives me so much comfort knowing that the tapes we watch were filmed less than 20 miles from where I am sitting. If anyone reading this worked on any training tapes, low budget movies, or defunct studios from around 1980-1997, please call me. I have SO many questions to ask.
CG: He has the dream job. God, I’d love to be able to churn it out like that. Cleveland’s own Mark L. Lester is a favorite, too.
FS: It’s hard to think about his filmography when I’ve only seen maybe 1/500th of it. The fact that he’s still working on a consistent basis is probably the best testament to his skill. Peter Manoogian, director of Eliminators and Arena, is someone I recently discovered. He hasn’t made that many movies but I will own them all someday.
Please elaborate on the crucial difference between ‘bad’ and ‘mediocre.’ How differently do we experience both types of presentation?
GS: I’m glad you asked that, because it can be difficult for people to understand the difference. I’ve tried telling people not familiar with what we do and they’ll say something like, ‘Oh, you mean like Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes?’ And I want to punch a wall in frustration—much like a D&D nerd gets mad when you confuse ‘magic’ with ‘magik.’ ‘Bad’ is a movie like Anthony Hopkins’ Slipstream—where it is so fantastically dumb, your jaw is gaped open for however long you can take it and you cannot stop thinking about it for months. ‘Mediocre’ is something like Good Luck Chuck where it is simply sooooo badly written and clearly combed over by hundreds of executive douches that all you get in the end is Dane Cook not being funny and smirking for an hour and a half. Sure, you can sit around with your friends and laugh at how awful it is, but it isn’t fun to watch in any way whatsoever. Even talking about that movie is making my blood boil and I have to stop. What a piece of garbage that movie is.
CG: Mediocre vs. bad—God, we deal with that constantly while hunting. I’d say mediocre is just terrible that is wearing make-up. It is in there and we’ll find it.
FS: Mediocre is when a how to video tells you something actually reasonable. Bad is when a how-to video tells you to put your hand in front of your face and sense the energy.
What’s next for EIT?
GS: Oh, folks, so much more! Aside from a lot of touring coming up, we will be releasing an EIT soundtrack, shirts, a coloring book—not kidding—and—if we’re lucky—an EIT-related show. Considering our DVD was only the tip of the crap-berg, we are hoping that we can churn out at least a couple more DVD’s before the world ends in 2012.
FS: We will continue to bring the EIT live show to other cities and we are working on a redesign for the site.
CG: We’re going to watch everything burn and laugh.

THE EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE! THE MOVIE DVD IS AVAILABLE NOW FROM EVERYTHINGISTERRIBLE.COM. VISIT EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE! AT EVERYTHINGISTERRIBLE.COM.

L.A. RECORD is happy to team up with Cinefamily, dublab, L.A. FilmForum and the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles to present A Throw Of Dice with a live score by world-class sitar player Nishat Khan and Tom Verlaine/Mick Jagger collaborator Jimmy Rip! Via Cinefamily:

Nishat Khan, one of the world’s greatest living sitar virtuosos, accompanied by consummate guitarist and bandleader Jimmy Rip (returning to the Cinefamily stage after his triumphant night with Tom Verlaine), provides a live score for this recently restored 1929 silent classic. A Throw of Dice (Prapancha Pash) is the third film in a pioneering trilogy of silent films made through a unique partnership between German director Franz Osten and Indian actor-producer Himansu Rai, whose films combined documentary techniques with narratives derived from Indian myths and legends. Based upon a section of the epic poem The Mahabharata, A Throw of Dice follows royal cousins Sohat and Rajit, neighboring rulers who have in common a love of gambling, tiger hunting….and same damsel Sunita. Soon they’re friendship turns to rivalry. Shot on location in Rajasthan with an extravagance that could only be matched by Cecil B. Demille, the film features over ten thousand extras and an impressive array of horses, elephants and tigers. Its star actors all had major careers in Indian cinema and remain legendary and much-loved figures. A Throw Of Dice is both a sumptuous epic and an intimate romantic drama, and Nishat Khan’s new score for the film will transplant you to lush, faraway kingdoms of the imagination.

Starts at 8 pm at Cinefamily (611 N. Fairfax!) and is all ages! Tickets $15 and available here or at the door!

Roach Coachella: Orders from the Fire Marshal sent the marathon Fauxchella festival packing from the announced Traction Ave. venue earlier in the week, but by showtime on Good Friday organizers had moved the event to gamier precincts many blocks away. Hangar 1018 is beloved of the downtown party set and I know the space well, having wandered along its sketchy and verminous stretch of S. Santa Fe many times in various states of hallucinogenic inebriation. Inside, instead of the usual haul of faux-fur and near-naked ladies, were a couple hundred gamboling on the fragments of their Eastside Cool. I was waved past the door by promoters spoke cheerily of the ultraviolence they’d already visited upon everyone else inquiring after The List. They looked entirely too jocose to be joking. The hour was advanced and most of the 11 scheduled acts had already unplugged and went, but the overdriven squeal-pop of Myonics was letting rip from the graffiti-doused back patio. It was like Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist projected inside a 1960s beach party movie—a lighthearted frolic of the seriously geeky young, complete with spastic dancing and bashful romance. In the main room, Globes on Remote held forth in like caramel-coated Depeche Mode or a Huey Lewis in receipt of really bad News. Such sugary ferocity was just what the occasion called for and the Allah Las were pouring it at 1 a.m. as I made my slow fade to the door, their psilocybin surf music howling like bonfire night at Owlsley State Beach.

Doing the Devil: The normal crowd at the Silent Movie Theatre these days is the hipper sort of cineaste; stylish singles and couples lounging before crazed dada like Myra Breckinridge or Repo: The Genetic Opera in an air of abstracted contemplation. I too can be found there on occasion, usually sitting gimlet-eyed along the back wall as some 1970s Eastmancolor atrocity is exhumed. Even so, Easter Sunday’s screening of F.W. Murnau’s Faust was the first actual silent movie I’d ever sat through at this last shrine to their memory. Scoring was the Cabeza de Vaca Arcestra, an ad-hoc assemblage featuring art-punk chanteuse Nora Keyes and members of South Bay high-artisans dios (malos) chattering, clanking and gorgeously caterwauling over this haunting and hallucinatory masterpiece. This freehanded adaptation of Goethe’s deathless wrestle between God and Devil was Murnau’s bow at Weimar film giant Ufa before being lured out here, bringing Emil Jannings—his Mephistopheles—with him. Jannings went on to win the very first Oscar given for Best Actor before heading home to Germany to make propaganda films for Hitler. So, as Kurt Vonnegut used it say, it goes. Still, no Satanic dereliction can wipe away Murnau’s visionary claptrap nor the dainty pallor of Camilla Horn as Gretchen, a face credibly worth the protagonist’s immortal ectoplasm. The Arcestra’s deepspace introspections and bone-chilling harmonics gently took the film sideways, subtly shifting the impact from morality fable to pagan fantasia. Since culture endlessly recycles itself in hybrids like these, happy is the conclusion that silent cinema is yet another idea whose time has come.

Rubaceous: The adorable Ruby Friedman majorly rocked the Viper Room on Monday, beneficiary of a hard-driving new Orchestra, a bucket of sweat and a couple of choice Iggyisms. Jumping in her maryjanes and batting babydoll eyes at a thick crowd of old and new friends, she rocketed the boys through an abbreviated set with the punky brio of Texas Terri Laird or Brody Armstrong. I know she was mercurial, but this? In the sagacious words of Barry Fitzgerald in The Quiet Man, “That red hair of hers is no lie.”

This Column Brought to You By: The kind folks at Shout Factory, knowing of my taste for antiquaria, bunged along their new career survey, Action: The Sweet Anthology and I’ve played it relentlessly my every writing moment all weekend. These two discs balance the hits and near-hits from this U.K. benzedrine-bubblegum judiciously, the hi-octane fluff turned in by outside songwriters Chinn and Chapman along with edgier band-written tunes. You’re allowed one revelation per retrospective and this collection’s surprise is Disc 2’s “Funk It Up (David’s Song),” the adenoidal glamsters’ surprisingly juicy pass at mid-1970s P-Funk. That and the album version of “Love is Like Oxygen,” truly a thing of beauty and a proggy joy at 6:52. The Sweet appears at the H.O.B. on April 30 and I may just shoehorn in.

—Ron Garmon

A landmark of German Expressionism, Faust was Murnau’s final film in Germany, impressing Fox Studios so much that they lured him to the U.S. immediately afterwards. The most expensive UFA film to date–taking six months to film, and costing over two million marks–Faust is full of bravura effects, including the magnificent signature visual of Mephistopheles towering over a miniature of Faust’s village like an enormous Angel of Death. Faust was also the final collaboration with Emil Jannings (who also played the fired doorman in Murnau’s Last Laugh, and the title role in Tartuffe). Jannings’ chameleonic performance is typically excellent, and, along with the film’s expert Rembrandt lighting and Bruegelesque imagery, makes Faust a complete cinematic experience never to be forgotten. The evening’s live score is provided by Cabeza De Vaca Arkestra, an all-star L.A. ensemble featuring Nora Keyes, and members of Dios Malos.
Dir. F.W. Murnau, 1926, 35mm, 106 min.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kV3bjDVIEl0]

[Buy Tickets]

How did the concept behind the whole Post Punk Junk festival come together? How long did it take to track down most of these films?
Bret: At the Cinefamily, our Thursday nights are set aside for music-related films, and punk/post-punk was simply a subject that we had yet to cover. Funny enough, it was punk films that first really got me into the music, instead of the other way around. Concert films like “Urgh! A Music War”, and compilation tapes of old TV shows like “New Wave Theater” really set me off on the right path, as far as my music tastes go — they were my ultimate mixtape.To our knowledge, no other revival cinema in L.A. has done the full-on punk film retrospective treatment (at this point, you’d think that MOCA would’ve tackled it, at least.) You’d see it pop up in bits and pieces, but never in a concentrated way, and never with as much enthusiasm. For example, the American Cinematheque did “Urgh! A Music War” about two years ago, and it was truly awesome to see the thing projected twenty feet high, with the PA system cranked — but they showed the 90-minute theatrical version. What we’re doing this time around is showing the same 35mm print they did, but after the film’s over, we’re also screening all the material in the extended home video version that they cut out. We’re bringing an obsessive’s perspective to the material, a record nerd’s mentality — which is what we do anyway with all our other festivals.The films themselves weren’t difficult to find. Most of them were just a single email away. A lot of these filmmakers are still active, and have websites through which you can contact them directly, or have their works placed in underground film libraries through which you can rent them. I got in touch with the Target Video gang initially through their MySpace page! Again, it’s the enthusiasm that rubs off — you tell them how awesome you think their work is, and you tell them what your plans are for the whole fest — and they say “yes”. Simple. You just gotta have the right plans.
Are any of these films premiering at the Cinefamily?
It’s very difficult to tell, but some of them, like the 16mm shorts “Crash ‘N Burn” (on April 16th) and “Debt Begins At Twenty” (on March 26th) are at least having their first L.A. screenings in almost thirty years.
What night would you consider the must see based on rarity or pure enjoyment?
I’m biased, of course, since my favorite band in the world is The Fall — so the night I’m most shitting myself over is the “Two Films About The Fall” program, where we’re showing the recent BBC documentary covering the band, as well as a vintage ’80s doc called “Hail The New Puritan”, which covers ballet dancer Michael Clarke and his wacko collaborations with The Fall and other bands. In terms of rarity and enjoyment colliding, I’d have to go with the Target Video tribute night, where Target founder Joe Rees is gonna dust off footage that he himself hasn’t viewed in ages, some even transferred from ancient reel-to-reel videotape. I specifically asked him to gather stuff of bands on his master list that even I myself hadn’t heard of, so I know it’s gonna be a killer show for the thrill of discovery alone!
Do any of the films or clips expose the Los Angeles punk scene or is it primarily New York and U.K?
In the end, the fest ended up U.K.-centric, but that’s a reflection of the larger number of well-made films on the subject to come out of that part of the world. Also, with this fest, I consciously avoided a few American films which I thought were “usual suspects”, films I know everyone who’s interested in the topic has already seen. Also-also, since we’re getting such a great response to this fest, I can easily see us doing another one next year with a totally different line-up.
Can you give us any hints to what kinds of “rare nuggets” will be screened on Target Video Tribute Night as well as the Post Punk Junk Mix Night?
The Target night, ultimately, is in the hands of Joe Rees, so I can’t say for sure about that night, but Tom Fitzgerald, one of my co-programmers, has lined up a total wet dream session of rarities for the mix night, including clips from the Irish doc “Shellshock Rock” (covering the Belfast scene), films from the Neue Deustche Welle (German New Wave) scene, live footage of the Suburban Lawns (one of our favorite old L.A. bands), and the Japanese post-punk band P-Model playing live on what appears to be the set of a Far East version of The Gong Show!

POST PUNK JUNK WITH THE PUNK ROCK MOVIE MAR. 5, TWO FILMS ABOUT THE FALL MAR. 12, MADE IN SHEFFIELD MAR. 19, URGH! A MUSIC WAR MAR. 26, POST PUNK JUNK MIX NIGHT APR. 2, AND MORE AT CINEFAMILY, 611 N FAIRFAX AVENUE, LOS ANGELES. 8 PM / $10 / ALL AGES. CINEFAMILY.ORG.

Dublab sets up esoteric musicians and Los Angeles on a blind date, videotapes the event and serves it over rum. We follow Ariel Pink to a karaoke bar, where he busts a move on neon bordered country roads. They plant Tom Brosseau amidst slurping soup and sliding chairs on linoleum at Clifton’s Diner. One gracious customer drops a dollar on his table. How might Peter Walker ripping on his guitar in the cave at Griffith Park work out? What will he say when a man wearing a loincloth appears holding a birthday cake? Walker’s response: “Oh, you guys.” Alessi surrounded by trees, twinkling rays of sunlight floating down through cracks between leaves to land on her dress. In this ongoing project, Vision Version, Dublab chooses locations that might capture or radiate the performer’s poetic temper, with the directors taking minimal or cosmic editing approaches. A warm room, Baby Dee at a piano, your eyes on the teeth, the pink hair and gray roots a tilted crown over her forehead. The Lucky Dragons video keeps reality a mystery, flame fists trailing in Rembrandt darkness. Rooftops, alleys, curbsides, a bird pet store, places you recognize but can’t name, and it feels all warm and gushy—not to mention the Silent Movie Theatre’s familial ambiance—makes ya think about how your house goes beyond your home, the life you stroll through and the city haunts that make up the sides are sort of an extension of your living room…and then Hecuba pops up in front of your leather couch, and they’ve got that great lyric about living in the living room. You throw confetti.

– Daiana Feuer