(no subject)

[mr_bad_example]

It's been a big couple of days for movie-watching. The Sound Unseen Film Festival is still going on. I had only really planned to go to the Superninjas film I mentioned in my last post, but gismonda persuaded me to check out a couple of other films, too.

Sunday, we saw Wesley Willis: The Daddy of Rock & Roll at St. Anthony Main. I was gratified that it wasn't the slightest bit exploitative. It just follows Willis around as he writes songs and visits friends. It sort of assuaged some of the lingering pangs of conscience I had about enjoying his music. His stuff is funny as hell, but I've always had a little twinge of guilt about the possibility of it turning into "Look at the freak." (Anybody who knows me can understand why I'm a little bit sensitive about that.) But what the film impressed upon me was that Willis was doing something that made him happy, and he'd have been doing it whether people listened to him or not. And, actually, the fact that people did listen to him enabled him to meet people who were able to get him a little bit of help. It's quite a film--he's a more complex character than you'd infer from listening to "I Whupped Batman's Ass."

Last night, I was back at St. Anthony Main for a pair of blues documentaries: Sugar Blue and The Howlin' Wolf Story. Sugar Blue is a short film about a harmonica player, Sugar Blue, who played with the Rolling Stones (he wrote and played harmonica on "Miss You") and has apparently been a fixture of the Chicago blues scene for decades. It was a short film, but it shed a lot of light on a subject I was entirely unfamilar with, which is what documentaries are supposed to do.

The Howlin' Wolf Story is easily my favorite of the films I've seen so far. Howlin' Wolf has long been my favorite blues artist, so it was nice to have the opportunity to learn more about him. Apparently footage of him performing is exceedingly hard to come by, so I consider myself especially lucky. Seeing Wolf perform is a fascinating thing. Whenever I think of the first-generation bluesmen, I always get an image similar to the famous photo of Robert Johnson: A guy with a guitar sitting in a chair. The thing that's commonly overlooked, and what startled me about Wolf, was that these guys were, in fact, pure sex. They showed a clip of Wolf performing on Shindig!, and even into his 50s, the guy--who was, by the way, easily my size--was out-Elvising Elvis. The film follows that up shortly thereafter with a clip of the Stones performing "Little Red Rooster," and for all he tries, Mick Jagger just looks like a piker. I don't think he was, really, it's just that you can't compete with Howlin' Wolf.

After the movie last night, I stopped by the Saloon to catch what I could of the Cruxshadows' show. I got there in time to see their encore. It was kind of an abrupt switch of gears to go from Howlin' Wolf to the Cruxshadows, but I suspect somewhere between the two lies the Truth. I mean no disrespect to the Cruxshadows when I say that it's probably closer to Howlin' Wolf.