EDINBURGH, Scotland — "I'll have a beer," says Robert Byington — "Bob," as he introduces himself to strangers — in a voice that slides from the recesses of his nasal cavities and out past his lips in a lazy drone. "That one," says the Austin-based filmmaker, pointing to a red label in a glass case behind the counter, and the barman plucks out a bottle of beer, snapping off the cap in one seamless motion.
"I don't know what you're supposed to drink here," Byington says, in thick horn-rimmed glasses and a fuzzy gray sweater.
The writer-director is referring to Edinburgh, home to the annual Edinburgh International Film Festival and host to the European premiere of his most recent film, "Harmony and Me."
The film, which was shot in Austin over the spring of 2008, is a follow-up to the critically acclaimed "RSO: Registered Sex Offender" and stars Bishop Allen frontman and Andrew Bujalski-favorite Justin Rice ("Mutual Appreciation," "Funny Ha Ha"). The film debuted to international audiences on June 19.
"Let's not talk about Bujalski," Byington quips over the loudening chatter of the Lounge, a backroom bar in the belly of the festival headquarters. "He gets enough press."
Facetious requests aside, it's difficult not to notice the Bujalskiesque similarities in "Harmony and Me." Even Byington concedes that the film is a "begrudgingly authorized sequel" to "Mutual Appreciation," and although he marches on in the mumblecore tradition of his filmmaking contemporary, the quirky and often farcical details of "Harmony and Me," most of which are based on events from the director's personal life, outshine its influences.
"Somebody walked up to me," Byington recalls, "and asked me to sign a card and said that this guy had a day to live." This incident is replayed in one of the initial scenes of "Harmony," in which a co-worker approaches Rice's character and asks him to sign a card for their terminally ill boss. "What do you write?" he asks rhetorically. "So I just signed my name."
Byington then says that he was at the Spider House Cafe around the same time and overheard an acquaintance shouting at someone on the telephone. "They were yelling about one of those vacuum cleaners that you rent at H-E-B. He hung up the phone and was like, 'Yeah, that was my wife and she doesn't know how to use the vacuum.' Those two events were the springboard for the movie."
Well, that and the undying pain of heartbreak. "It was the definite overlay," Byington says, although he's unsure about how much of himself he actually fused into the lovelorn and melancholic title character.
According to Byington, most of "Harmony," at least in the final days of the script, was written with Rice in mind. The casting, along with cameos from other Austin live music stalwarts such as Bob Schneider and Jerm Pollet, underscores the film's thematic elements of music as a means to work through pain.
Beyond the film, Byington says, much of his professional success has been based on the ability to harness creativity in times of grief, even at the start of his career.
In 1993, he traveled to Australia to visit his mother and a friend. A week before, his friend had been killed in a drunken-driving accident, and Byington wasn't told until after he landed in Australia. "I was sort of despondent and a little out of it, so I just wrote a script instead of doing anything else."
He concedes that he hadn't done much writing before the tragedy, although, in retrospect, the situation "turned out to be ideal because it forced me to write ... I didn't come out of a room for three weeks."
Byington says he sees himself today at a crossroads in his career. "I can either make a movie for low budget ... or I can try and make a movie with bigger actors and more money."
Byington's speaking of his newest project, "Seven Chinese Brothers," which is set to start filming in Austin in the fall. The film is loosely based on the second track of the 1984 REM album "Reckoning" and would be the final addition to what he calls his "Austin trilogy."
"That's pretentious, to use the word 'trilogy' in your own work," Byington says. "Uh, I'm making a trilogy ... Yes, I'm working on a trilogy."
In the meantime, he says he's enjoying the festival screenings of "Harmony and Me."
Before arriving in Edinburgh, "Harmony and Me" screened to warm
receptions at the CineVegas Film Festival in Las Vegas, Nev., and the
New Directors/New Films festival in Manhattan. Over the weekend,
Byington was in L.A. for more screenings at the Los Angeles Film
Festival.
— Originally featured in the Austin American-Statesman and on Austin360.com
GLASGOW, Scotland — Outside the tiny Soviet-inspired Bar Bloc, it was a typical spring night in Glasgow: A humid chill swaddled the city and rain spat on sideways as the sun receded behind the brown tenements and a kaleidoscope of gray filled the sky. Inside, wooden tables outnumbered warm bodies and framed a path to a small stage where the Austin-based instrumental sextet Balmorhea played, silhouetted by red light and evoking a cinematic soundscape that moved the listener from a cold, nearly empty bar in Scotland to the epic pastorals of West Texas.
The narrative symphonic elements of Balmorhea, paired with the experimental and folk music influences of co-founders Michael Muller and Rob Lowe, have garnered comparisons to Glaswegian post-rock icons Mogwai and celebrated cinematic composers Max Richter ('Waltz With Bashir') and Yann Tiersen ('Amelie').
Although the complex sound of a band like Balmorhea typically avoids genre classification by nature, Lowe says, such comparisons aren't off the mark. The 'cinematic' band recently has been hired by French writer-director Kim Chapiron to score the film 'Dog Pound,' which is set to be released in France next spring.
In light of this professional accomplishment, Muller conceded that the band's fan base in Europe is 'way more than America' and even credited a theater performance in the coastal Italian town of Rimini as having been 'the best concert (the band) ever played.' Lowe added that some fans traveled almost the width of Italy to attend their most obscure shows, while in larger cities such as London and Glasgow, most fans simply failed to show up at all.
'It's hard to gauge why people come to your shows,' Lowe said about sparse attendance at U.K. dates. 'I don't know if it's actually a good barometer to tell how many fans you have in a city.'
The May 6 performance at Bar Bloc marked the two-thirds point of a one-month tour in support of Balmorhea's fourth release, 'All Is Wild, All Is Silent.'
The venue, outfitted in an ironic sickle and hammer aesthetic, modern art and wood-slatted walls, was unequipped to handle the size or sound of the band. Low ceilings and a tiny stage forced the classically trained Lowe to forgo the use of his electric piano, which shot holes in their intended set, Muller said.
Some of the piano-driven highlights from 'All Is Wild,' such as the layered and crescendoed 'Harm and Boon,' as well as the somber dialogue of 'Truth,' were replaced with the string-based tracks from the band's repertoire.
The standout was 'Remembrance,' a nostalgic and despairing tune that opened with the sparse rhythm of Muller's acoustic guitar, layered with the respective picking of Lowe on banjo, Aisha Burns on violin and Travis Chapman on double bass. Slowly, as the song inched forward, the whine of Burns' violin led the listener further inside the musical narrator, marrying the deep mournful hum of Nicole Kern's cello to the rattle and eventual release of Bruce Blay's explosive percussion. At the close, the song doubled back with the return of the banjo and a final, haunting exchange between the violin and a lone melodica.
The diversity of the band is showcased not only within the menagerie of instruments or the raw, creative talent of its members, but also in the emotional and narrative variety of their music. At one moment, the band captures the listener in a bittersweet and tortured requiem, such as 'Remembrance,' and in another, the listener is again captive, a witness to the hope and happiness of wide open spaces and impending change, such as within the Texas-inspired 'Coahuila.'
This diversity and artistry is what propels the popularity of
Balmorhea and ensures the longevity of its members' respective careers
— be it in film score, within a groundbreaking neoclassical rock band,
or straddling the fence between both.
— Originally featured in the Austin American-Statesman and on Austin360.com
GLASGOW, Scotland — On the surface, Austin and Glasgow don't have much in common. Dig a little deeper and the cities, regardless of geographical or cultural differences, share two very important commonalities: the fanaticism of football and the love of live music. It is the latter appreciation for music, specifically independent music, that draws hundreds of touring acts through Glasgow each year and packed the Òran Mór for a sold out performance by Austin's Okkervil River last weekend .
Okkervil formed in 1998 and are currently on tour in support of "The Stand Ins," their most recent release on the Bloomington, Ind.-based record label JagJaguwar and a follow-up to the 2007 critically acclaimed "The Stage Names." There are six of them — nine, if you count the road crew and the Czech tour manager — crammed into "a Gypsy wagon," as bassist Patrick Pestorius calls it, for a 20-date European tour that began in late October with a rather adventurous kick-off performance at the Loppen Christiania in Denmark's capital city Copenhagen.
The Loppen, Austin music veteran and Okkervil keyboardist Justin Sherburn says, began as a "squat" in 1971 and, in recent years, has come under pressure from conservative local government. "There was actually a police raid the morning we were trying to load out," Sherburn says. "(The police) were trying to tear down some buildings so we had to basically just grab our gear and split so we wouldn't get locked down." Lucky for Okkervil, everyone escaped with an interesting story, the likes of which are surely commonplace for a band that tours six to eight months out of every year.
Sunday's performance at the Òran Mór marked their eighth stop in Europe and, judging by the looks of sheer enthusiasm and elation among faces in the audience, probably one of the more electric live shows on this tour to date. The Òran Mór, which is Gaelic for "the great music" or "big song," was originally established as the Kelvinside Parish Church in 1862 but after many years spent derelict, the building was refurbished in 2002 and opened as a theater, restaurant, and live music venue in 2004. From the outside, the Òran Mór is an impressive, three-story Romanesque relic with a towering brown stone steeple and an imposing arched front entrance. Once inside the basement venue, in contrast, the old church transforms into an intimate, dimly lit gothic chamber with chiseled stone walls and low wooden ceilings that draw the eye to a small stage at the heart of the room.
Lead singer Will Sheff and the rest of Okkervil walked onto stage at 8:40 p.m. and began picking through the opening chords of "Singer Songwriter," the third track off "The Stand-Ins." At the mere sight of the band, the audience — a sea of more than 500 bobbing heads — unleashed a deafening barrage of screams and hoots that, for a moment, threatened to drown the vocalist's recognizable tenor and continued between songs throughout the entire 80-minute set. Who would've thought: Thousands of miles from home, across the Atlantic, on rain-soaked Scottish soil, that these hometown favorites — this group of Austinites — could incite such sustained musical fever among Glaswegians? Any silence, such as the hush before Sheff eased into an acoustic rendering of "A Stone" with multi-instrumentalist band mates Lauren Gurgiolo and Scott Brackett, was filled with requisite song requests, genderless shrieking, or the occasional desperate cry of "I love you."
Admittedly, though, an Okkervil River show is an emotive experience. Sheff is the quintessential front man — engaging, enigmatic, tender and slightly aloof — but it's the chemistry and talent of the band together that really make the live show fun. Even through the sure strain of countless weeks of touring, innumerable performances of the same songs, and various drafts of set lists, the band maintains a dedicated passion to their performance and pours that emotion over every song and every person in the audience.
One couldn't help but feel moved at Gurgiolo's banjo picking and Pestorius' baritone as the band cut into "Lost Coastlines." There was a collective, venue-wide swoon at the sound of Brackett's bellowing trumpet in the literary and musically allusive "John Allyn Smith Sails," which ends with a brief cover of the Beach Boys' bittersweet 1966 single "Sloop John B" and the haunting repetition of the verse "I want to go home."
Home, for the sextet, is about seven performances and just less than a month away. Okkervil River's return stateside precedes a four-month respite, the longest amount of time the band has spent in Austin in more than two years, Pestorius says. Time at home leaves most of the band entertaining ideas of a "normal life," returning to respective relationships, side projects, and day-jobs in the live music capital of the world. While Glasgow — "Europe's Secret Capital of Music" as Time Magazine once called the city — anxiously awaits the next Okkervil return.
Shannon McGarvey is a former American-Statesman writer now attending graduate school in Scotland.
— Originally featured in the Austin American-Statesman and on Austin360.com
GLASGOW, Scotland - There's no right way for a woman to climb into the back of a tour van with the lead singer of a band. Especially when the van is parked in a seedy cobblestone alley and the lead singer is the strapping James Petralli - vocalist-guitarist for the spastic Austin buzz band White Denim.
The three-piece, which also includes bassist Steve Terebecki and drummer Josh Block, has been on the road in spurts throughout most of 2008. Monday night's performance at Stereo, the Charles Rennie Mackintosh-designed office building turned inner city vegan café and venue, was the last of a two-week string of shows in Western Europe and the U.K. with the London-based Six Nation State. The night before, White Denim played the Ruby Room in Manchester and had a late start heading to Glasgow the following morning, delaying their arrival by a couple of hours.
Petralli, whose long hair peeks from under a blue and red knit cap, now sits on a bench seat in the back of the cluttered van, plucks a cigarette from a bronze-colored pack, asks if he can smoke, and begins to explain the band's tardiness. "We had kind of a late night last night." He taps the cigarette in an ashtray on a side panel. "We played the new record for the record label people, and I drank a little too much whiskey." He's speaking of the re-release of "Workout Holiday," the band's first full-length album on the U.K. label Full Time Hobby. The re-release includes selected songs from White Denim's full-length U.S. debut "Exposion," plus the addition of a bonus EP, which bridges the gap between the two albums.
The vocalist is careful to clarify that such late-night indulgences have been the exception for him on this tour; he damaged his voice early on in Holland. "We visited Amsterdam, and I smoked a lot of filterless cigarettes," he says, pausing for a moment of loaded reflection. "... It's been a long couple of weeks."
Just then, Josh Block appears in the window of the van and pulls at the handle on the sliding door. He pokes his head through the rectangular opening, "You've gotta see this band - they're really good!" He's referring to the Glaswegian four-piece Schnapps, whose sonic reverberations can be felt all the way into the alley. Petralli seems unfazed, nods and continues with his train of thought as Block retreats back inside the club.
Of all the rigors of touring, the most difficult task, Petralli says, is the lack of exercise and food selection. "Diet is one of the biggest things ... because I don't like eating fast food."
Though Scotland and England bear many historical and cultural offerings, it is sad to say that food cannot often be included within its list of global contributions. Truthfully, most Scottish and English cuisine can be narrowed down to two categories: boiled or fried. This culinary conundrum lends itself to the affliction of which White Denim menacingly calls "van belly."
But there's a lot more to the U.K. than food. For starters, as Petralli notes, U.K. audiences are a lot livelier than those stateside. "London's been the best for us ... but we're still doing really humble shows. People actually dance to our songs and know the words and even mosh."
What's most curious to the charmingly modest musician, however, is the age range among European crowds. "It's really interesting. We'll have 14-year-old kids show up to well ... did you see the guy with the cane inside? He's our Glasgow fan."
To the credit of the band, there was more than just a lone elder in the audience. In fact, throughout the entire 45-minute set, the basement of Stereo was awash with jerking bodies and spastic dancing. The boys ended with an encore, which seems to be customary for headliners in these parts, and wasted little time in packing equipment and loading up the van.
Terebecki and Petralli had an early flight to catch the next morning, and the band was eager to embark on its three-month respite from touring. Their next show comes after Petralli's wedding in January and just after Valentine's Day in Guadalajara, Guadalajara.
Shannon McGarvey is a former American-Statesman writer now attending graduate school in Scotland.
— Originally featured in the Austin American-Statesman and on Austin360.com
AUSTIN, Texas — If performances from six groundbreaking local bands, a slew of requisite Austin fashionistas, and a drunken half-naked Santa Claus are your type of thing, then chances are you were at the Aasim Holiday Party at Red 7 on Saturday night. The show, which boasted a roster of old-to-new school local acts such as Glorium, …And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead, Those Peabodys, the Black, Diagonals, and Ume, was a belated birthday party for Aasim Syed, a QA Analyst and photographer.
In recent years, Syed evolved into a bit of a local house party legend by hosting all out rock-fests with intimate performances by Austin “it” bands. “All the bands that played were friends,” Syed says, “like the Black, Brothers and Sisters, Voxtrot, Black Angels, A Tiger Named Lovesick, and others.”
Last year, in an effort to cut down on some carpet cleaning (and presumably remain in good standing with his neighbors), Syed moved the yearly bash to the Beauty Bar for a packed show featuring DJ sets and a performance by Aaron Blount of A Tiger Named Lovesick. When August rolled around earlier this year and his annual birthday fiesta ceased to materialize, the photographer confessed that he “still had the strong desire to throw a full-on bash before the year was over.”
And what better way to celebrate one’s belated birthday and the holiday season, than to organize a veritable festival of Austin music royalty, bring a notorious local act to its original lineup, and commission a virtually defunct South Texas band to play an album they released a decade ago?
Sure, the promise of witnessing Trail of Dead — Conrad Keely, Jason Reece, and Kevin Allen — as a three-piece was draw enough for many of the audience in attendance. But for much of the crowd, the real meat and potatoes of the Holiday Party was the incredibly rare opportunity to see a performance by the mythical San Antonio avant-gardists Glorium. The five-piece, who formed in 1991, seldom perform since relocating to different cities nearly ten years ago.
“Glorium has played shows few and far between,” says vocalist Paul Streckfus, “because initially we all lived in different cities, beginning around 1998. We would play out when we could all get together.” In fact, the group has performed publicly less than ten times since releasing their 1998 album “Close Your Eyes,” which they played in it’s entirety on Saturday.
The album, recorded in Streckfus’ attic and in an East Austin studio, released to mixed reviews and has since been rendered to the bowels of virtual music obscurity. Lucky for the band, Austin music lovers feed on such obscurity and view witnessing a group like Glorium perform tantamount to discovering a unicorn.
Track-for-track, Paul Streckfus wriggled and balanced on the edge of the stage while the rest of Glorium traced the ambient and driving overlapping melodies of “Close Your Eyes.” With the help of tight arrangements from drummer Juan Miguel Ramos, guitarists Linus Streckfus and Ernest Salaz (who is also member to I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness), and bassist Jorge Lara, the band sailed through renditions of crowd shakers such as “Doomsday Kiss” and “Moonbeam King,” making one fact dreadfully clear: after all these years, audiences still love Glorium.
So much so that it’s a wonder why the group hasn’t released an album since that of the 2004 record “Fantasmas.” According to vocalist Streckfus, the band isn’t “recording new material right now,” though he’s quick to add that his new band, Kingdom of Suicide Lovers is recording an album, as is I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness.
Though Glorium may have toiled over old material on Saturday night, Austin’s wonder-band Trail of Dead had plenty new pieces to share. The three-piece, with Keely and Reece rotating singing, drumming and guitar duties, played loads of work off their recently released EP “Festival Thyme,” as well as songs from an untitled upcoming full-length.
Other highlights from the Holiday Party included an early performance by the utterly brilliant pop-country musings of the Black, who released their six-song EP “Donna” in the summer of 2007. The foursome, fronted by the ever-smiling vocalist, guitarist, and pianist David Longoria, filled the back patio of the Red 7 and even prompted a couple of brave souls (okay, maybe just Aasim and a friend) to spastically jerk and hop about during the raucous renditions of songs such as “Eshu Blues” and “Little Hits.”
This town may have its fair share of garage-country acts but nobody does it like the Black. They do country when country was the mere echo of an opening guitar chord, the whoosh and slap of a drum, a lovelorn whine on the microphone, and a slick pearl-snap button-down shirt. The Black has a firm finger to the pulse of Austin and, by the look and sound of the rest of the Aasim Holiday Party, so does Syed.
Music and turnout aside, the event was a complete success. Beside, one knows that they’ve scored a hit when anyone — let alone a dude in a Santa Claus suit — climbs atop the bar at last call and proceeds to get naked.
It’s Austin, gotta love it!
— Shannon McGarvey (Originally featured on Austin360.com)
Aasim and a half-naked Santa Claus
...please visit my Scotland-related blog at thelookingglasgow.vox.com.
I'm going to just come out and say it: I love Joe Biden.
His speech at the Democratic Convention last night was not only rousing and passionate, but underscored my already gleaming opinion of the man, save the contrived "more of the same" McCain rhetoric. Still I agree with most, if not all, of what he had to say and, believe it or not, he actually appeared sincere!
When Obama entered at the end of Biden's speech, the appearance was admittedly awkward. In a somewhat last-minute announcement, he declared that he would deliver tonight's speech at Denver's Mile-High Stadium. This news didn't settle well with me. Admittedly, I've been uneasy since learning of an Obama-assassination plot earlier this week. Maybe I'm being paranoid but I don't feel that speaking in an arena such as Mile-High Stadium will provide the most favorable safety conditions for the presidential hopeful or his camp.
This morning I overheard two coworkers discussing a story on the front page of the Statesman in which David Liebe, a newspaper columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, intentionally left his 11-year-old son at a McDonald's after the two engaged in some sort of an argument. Liebe, who claimed to live only "a few blocks" from the restaurant, returned shortly thereafter to find police officers questioning his son. After a long lecture from the cops, father and son apologized to each other and the two were sent on their way. This past Tuesday detectives arrived at Liebe's home and arrested him on charges of child abandonment and endangerment. Ever since, newsrooms and blogs around state have been buzzing with discussing over Liebe and what qualifies as poor parenting skills.
One of my coworkers disapprovingly recounted a story about driving through the desert with his brother and his brother's young children. The kids were acting out and, after repeated reprimands, the brother had enough. "If you two don't stop fighting," my coworker mimicked, "I'm going to pull this car over and make you get out!" Apparently he actually pulled over, in the middle of 50 miles of barren desert mind you, and even opened a car door. Contrary to what he'd hoped to accomplish, the children actually took him up on his offer and bolted from the car, running into the dry expanse of the desert. My coworker said that he and his brother had to wait nearly two hours for the children to return, which they did only when they became thirsty. The image of this continues to make me laugh, though my coworker still cannot find the humor in the situation.
In my family, the threat of "pulling the car over" was always an idle one. I honestly cannot remember a time when my cousins or myself were so misbehaved that my mother, father, or relative literally wished to pull the car over and make us get out. Granted, I am not a parent, but I would never kick a child out of a car and intentionally abandon them in any location — be it a McDonald's parking lot "a few blocks" from my home or the middle of the freaking desert.
Blue Velvet Vintage, my favorite Austin vintage clothing boutique (next to New Bohemia, of course), closes it's central location at 2100 Guadalupe St. and moves its inventory to 217 W. North Loop, on Thursday, Aug. 21.
At the risk of sounding like an old-timer at 25, I can remember when Blue Velvet was located off of Dean Keaton and Red River streets. Alas, greener pastures await on North Loop Blvd., as Blue Velvet joins the ranks of such Austin treasures as Room Service Vintage, Monkeywrench Books, and the Parlor. If you recall, North Loop also once housed to the now defunct vintage clothing store Slinky Whistle Bait, run by local fashionista sisters Donna and Erica Barton.
So there you have it. You've got until Sunday, Aug. 24, to purchase every item at Blue Velvet's Drag location at 50 percent off. After Sunday, everything is then marked up to 75 percent off and that's not even the best part! On the last two days in August — everything in the store is $1. Good luck with those last days. You'll be clawing over the XXXL, size 42 section.
Some douche in my favorite store!!
Effective July 28, the US Art Authority will close it's doors indefinitely due to "unforeseen issues with the City of Austin." The USAA, which has been a venue for local music and art events since it's opening earlier this year, possessed the requisite health and safety permits but, due to a zoning technicality and repeated complaints from an unidentified individual, has discontinued business.
The USAA marks one in a local trend of business and art space closings, including the impending closure of the South Austin performance space mainstay the Enchanted Forrest. Read more about this closing on the SpiderHouse website.
